Where Is My Passport? A Visa Office Misadventure
Not so much a case as a short but instructive story about what happens to passports sent to the visa office for visa stamping
The applicant had applied for a visa while in Canada. The application was approved, and all that remained was a simple final step: send the passport to the visa office to have the visa stamped inside it. In this case, the visa office was in Ottawa. The passport was mailed and successfully delivered to the recipient.
Several weeks passed. No passport, no visa, and the visa office was not responding to inquiries.
Several more weeks passed. Having lost all hope and having failed to get a single word from the visa office, the applicant went to the police to report the passport as lost. The police asked about the circumstances and then did something straightforward: they called the visa office in Ottawa through some internal channel.
And that is when the truth came out. The passport had not been lost at all – it had been sitting in the visa office the entire time. The reason given for the delay was vague: "some unfamiliar return address, not matching the applicant's."
After this intervention, the passport with the visa was immediately mailed out from the visa office and received the very next day.
What Actually Happened
So what was this mysterious unfamiliar address? The prepaid return envelope bore the address of 5409 Yonge St., Suite 205 in Toronto – the address of our office.
To summarize what the visa office staff managed to accomplish:
- They noticed that the return address on the envelope did not match the applicant's residential address.
- They did not notice that the return address on the envelope matched the address of the applicant's duly authorized immigration representative, as listed in the application file.
- They did nothing at all about the situation: no request for clarification, no response to inquiries.
So now we know where your passports go when you are waiting for them to come back with a visa. They simply wait – until the police takes an interest in their fate.
Lawpoint Immigration manages the full visa application process, including passport submission and follow-up with visa offices.