11 March 2012 - Getting a work permit - on Sunday

Upon entering Russia with your visa that was issued to allow you to get a work permit, you must meet in person with the FMS (Federal Migration Service) within three business days of your arrival for an interview in order to actually get the work permit. I had heard from others that there was a long interview involved as well as lots of stamping of documents. The firm provides someone to take you through this experience that is generally performed entirely in Russian. I faced this with a bit of trepidation.

So my colleagues in Russia set up a meeting with the FMS the Sunday after I arrived. Yes, that's right, a Sunday. The previous Thursday was a national holiday (International Women's Day), so people also took off Friday in exchange for working on Sunday so that they still had a sort of three day weekend. I thought this was just something that our firm was doing and assumed that if the government gave its employees the Friday off, they certainly wouldn't make them work on Sunday (I mean, they're government employees and don't they usually get more holidays off than the rest of us?). But I was wrong. Not only were they working, but the offices were open for business to the public just like on any other business day. This was the beginning of my confusion over the process that was to follow.

Overall, I was surprised with the reality of it all, though - extremely quick, direct and efficient. Yes, we are talking about a government agency here.

The office where we had an appointment was only a short cab ride away. It was a relatively drab, non-descript building that didn't exactly scream "government" in the way that many other drab, non-descript buildings might. The outer door was unlocked and we walked right in and through a metal detector that beeped quite a bit as we passed through. At the top of the staircase as you entered were some security types watching people come in, but who were apparently unperturbed by the beeping and not inclined to ask to search our bags for possible weapons as might be the case at a federal building in the U.S. Also unlike the U.S., we walked directly to a door, knocked and walked in, and were directly in someone's office. No gate keepers. No queue. I was so confused.

When we walked into the office, the first thing I noticed was, of course, the occupant of the office - a relatively young woman in her late 20s or early 30s dressed in a way that suggested competence and professionalism. Hmmmm.

The second thing I noticed was the ambience. By which I mean the chill music that was playing in the background. Where is the horrible elevator music? This was actually, well, pleasant. Not so governmental.....

The third thing that caught my eye was the computer on the desk. No, not an aging PC from the 90s, but an iMac. Which I suppose might also have been enabling the chill music.

And the final thing that I really was not expecting? A Liebherr calendar. No, not featuring their line of eco-friendly refrigerators (including wine cabinets, not that I have been checking), but their heavy construction equipment. German/Swiss equipment. Featured in a government office of a trendy young woman chilling out while working on her iMac. Fabulous. Perhaps it instilled a bit of Swiss efficiency into the process as this normally bureaucratic process was accomplished in just about 5 minutes!

Anyway, I got the work permit. I learned later that those who get the full work permit, versus the HQS type, have to go to a large building on the outskirts of the city where there are long lines and a lot of frustration. Ah, THAT sounds more like government in action, no matter where you go.

21 March 2012 - Busy season food

The first few months of the year are pretty hectic for auditors and are generally known collectively as "busy season." (It is not the same thing as tax season, which most people seem to think of when they think about accountants, though there is of course some overlap.) Audit busy season is not driven entirely by a deadline as it may be for one's personal taxes, though there are similarities. The frenetic time is primarily driven by the simple fact that the majority of companies have a fiscal year that is the same as the calendar year. So they close their books in early January and then expect the auditors to be immediately available to audit said books. Publicly traded companies do indeed have deadlines by which they must file their audited financial statements, so they generally get priority. But any way you look at it, everything needs to get done before 31 March because then you are in the midst of first quarter financials and the cycle just keeps on going.

The practical impact of this is that auditors work like dogs during these months, working late into the night and on weekends and generally are not allowed to take vacations (and if they do, they risk the scorn of their colleagues who are still slaving away at the office while they are on the beach or hitting the slopes). This time of year also coincides with cold and flu season, so add sickness to the mix and it can be a really miserable time of year.

The firm does try to ease the pain as much as possible, though. In our Chicago office, for example, free lunch was provided in the office on Saturday. Generally, our professionals are out at the client during the week, but the clients aren't wild about us roaming about their premises unsupervised, I suspect, so the teams often work at home or in the office, so this is a nice perk.

In Frankfurt, I don't recall any perks other than the monthly cocktail hours held on Friday evening at the office, which happens throughout the year. And let's be honest, who wants to spend a Friday night drinking at the office rather than spending precious hours with friends or family?

Our Moscow office, though, takes busy season seriously and demonstrates it through a lot of feeding. It starts in the morning. First, a plate of sliced lemons is delivered in each kitchen area to be used with the tea (which is the preferred drink here, rather than coffee, which is difficult for me to get accustomed to). Then, somewhere around nine, a huge basket of fruit is also delivered to the kitchen areas. You can tell when it has arrived as a swarm of people is making its way towards the kitchen. Same fruit every day - bananas, apples and oranges. And finally, at 8 PM, pizza or some other type of dinner is delivered, though it's not clear to me where the feast occurs - I just see audit colleagues bringing some of the spoils back to their desks. All in all, though, a very nice gesture that improves morale, might strengthen immune systems through the healthy fruit and lets our people know we do care about them. Well, and their productivity. ;-)

18 March 2012 - In search of legality

(Warning: This blog posting is likely to be a bit on the dry side, but I consider it an important part of getting to Russia, so I'm sharing it anyway. It'll also give you a bit of the frustration involved in the process.)

Despite our obvious charms (and our arrogance, of course), there are some places where the famous blue passport (you know the one I'm talkin' about and it is not the one from Canada) isn't enough to let you into another country. You know, such as countries that have traditionally had issues with the US -- like Russia and China. So a visa application is required, which visa varies depending on how much time you have, the amount you're willing to pay (no, not talking about bribes), the purpose of your visit and, of course, whether it appears that you want to stay there for the rest of your life or if you will indeed leave.

(As a side note, do you know that US passports were generally green until 1976 when the color was changed to blue in honor of the bicentennial? Or have you seen one of the limited edition green ones that were issued for about a year starting in 1993 to commemorate 200 years of the US Consular Service. There were also red passport covers in the past. Who knew??)

Anyway, when I first learned that I needed to go to Russia, I had very little time as I wanted to get here for as much transition time as possible with my predecessor in the job. Alas, getting a business visa is not a very quick thing. As near as I can tell, our firm in Germany must issue a request letter that indicates a bunch of things. Our firm in Russia, in term, submits something to the Russian government, which then (if you're lucky) issues an official invitation letter. That must be physically mailed/shipped from Russia to Germany, which takes about two days. THEN you begin the real visa request process, which involves filling out a very long firm reminiscent of my requests for licenses to practice law or be a public accountant, in terms of requiring a lot of detailed information about where you have gone to school, where you have lived and a bunch of things you have likely forgotten about and must spend some time researching. (My favorite request was a list of all the countries I have visited in the past 10 years and the year of travel. Seriously?!) In my case, I then turned over my passport along with the application form, an extra passport photo and the invitation letter to a visa service provider.

I don't know about you, but when I am in a country that is not my own, I get a bit nervous about handing over my passport. And while it's true that you don't generally have to show state-issued photo identification to travel within the Schengen zone countries (generally the European Union with a few notable exceptions like the UK not participating but Switzerland does), when you show up at a German hotel and speak in English, you are usually asked for your passport.

Now, as luck would have it, I was scheduled to be traveling the day that the official invitation letter should be received from Russia. Ditto for our entire practice. So I had to beg a poor, unsuspecting intern who wasn't attending the meetings with the rest of us to please pick up our mail from the mailroom, look for this envelope for me, and then combine it with the precious packet of documents containing my passport, and take it to the visa service provider. Meanwhile, I made a color photocopy of my passport and asked (okay, begged) my assistant to please call the hotel and make sure I would be able to check in without the original passport. They said they would note it, and indeed it wasn't a problem. I still felt a bit naked without that little blue book, though!

When we submitted the application, there was also a bit of a mystery as to how long it should take to get the visa (a double-entry business visa). One source said it would be 5-7 business days (which would get me there after my predecessor was already gone), whereas another said 3-5 business days for expedited service. Fortunately, the latter range was correct. But still, I had to book flights and hotel in advance in order to request the visa, so each day was a guessing game of whether I would indeed travel then or if I would have to re-schedule. I also had another trip to Munich that raised my anxiety again about traveling without my passport. Fortunately, though, everything worked out and I traveled to Moscow with about three days of transition time with the predecessor.

I was only able to stay in Moscow about a week for my first trip due to some meetings I had to attend in Prague. This meant that when I returned, I would essentially have to camp out there until my work permit was ready as otherwise I would have no right to re-enter the country. No problem, though. I mean, how long could that really be?

Most work permits take at least three months to obtain, which was time we didn't have. There is a faster kind of work permit/visa known as the HQS (for Highly Qualified Specialist - don't laugh when you think of me and this label in the same sentence, please). This one could allegedly be obtained in about four weeks from the time that I had a contract with the Russian firm. So on the first of February, I signed a contract and the estimated availability of the work permit was 24 February. Terrific. So I felt comfortable leaving Russia on the 19th of February for a client matter back in the European Union, with the idea that I would be on site at the client on 20-23 February, then return to Frankfurt on the 24th and pick up the work permit then. I followed up periodically to ensure that the 24th was still the date we were shooting for and nothing seemed to change. Terrific. Everything functioning as planned. I felt like I still lived in Germany....

There was one slight wrinkle in that the 23rd was a national holiday in Russia (Motherland Defenders Day) and many were also taking the 24th off, though the latter wasn't an official national holiday. On the 22nd, it occurred to me that I wasn't sure how/where I should pick up the work permit, so I sent an email to our team in Russia to see what the plan was. With the three hour time difference, the team had already gone home for the day/holiday, though I did get a response on the 24th, right around the time I landed in Frankfurt. Essentially, due to the holiday, the Russian government hadn't yet provided the invitation letter, so things would be delayed a while for the visa.

What invitation letter? What visa? What about the work permit? Despite the weeks of obsessive-compulsively (Lord help me, I AM an accountant with a checklist problem) re-confirming the process and timeline, I was told that the 24th was the day that our firm in Russia expected to get yet another invitation letter from the Russian government. This would then have to be mailed to us in Frankfurt, upon receipt of which we would have to do yet another visa that would likely take another week. Uhhh, WHAT?!!!! I noted that they had arranged for me to move into my corporate apartment in Moscow on the 1st of March, so even if they'd gotten the letter on time, there was no way under the timeline they'd just outlined that that was possible. "Well...."

This is about the time that I saw my carefully crafted timetable begin to disintegrate and my life as I knew it begin a sort of death spiral. That timetable looked as follows (24th was a Friday):

• 25-26 Feb - Haircut in Frankfurt (I remain freaked out by the idea of finding a hairdresser in Russia and let's not even ponder the whole coloring aspect - and I think color will be even more important with the stress-induced proliferation of silver strands that will be occurring in the next months). And then frantic work to determine which things I could fit in suitcases to take to Russia, which things should be thrown out, which electrical goods I needed to find homes for, and which things should be sent via sea to the US in a shipping container and placed in storage until my arrival. And hopefully dinner or brunch with my fantastic neighbors.
• 27 Feb - Lads to the veterinarian for a health certificate and parasite treatment. Russia requires that the parasite treatment be administered within 3-5 days of travel.
• 28 Feb - Moving day, after which my apartment would no longer be livable for humans (but perhaps okay for cats awaiting their transport)
• 29 Feb - Return of Hudson, my delightful A5 lease car. Pick-up of Lads by PetRelocation.com contact for the journey; they will spend the night in Lufthansa's Animal Lounge (not joking - http://lufthansa-cargo.com/index.php?id=138).
• 1 March - Flight to Russia. Lads arrive in Russia.

So moving one piece of this puzzle would more or less cause the house of cards to come down. Lovely. So, what to do? Well, not a whole lot of options other than just rolling with the flow and seeing what happened.

The invitation letter finally arrived in Frankfurt on Wednesday, along with a reminder that I would need an HIV test. Huh? There was also a recommendation to use a visa service in Berlin. I asked whether this visa was procedurally different than the previous one, in which case I would prefer to have the local visa service do the work so we didn't lose even more time shipping the passport (!!) and other documents to Berlin and back. They said it wouldn't matter. So while I was rushing to my doctor to get an HIV test, I had my assistant contact the local visa service to ensure that they could perform the work and to get an idea of how long this might take.

When I finally emerged from the doctor's office (miraculously, they did not see fit to give me an infusion via IV as in the past, so the appointment only took a little over an hour instead of the regular 2-3 hour visit), a few things had taken place. First, the local visa service said that an HIV test (results of which wouldn't be available until Friday, which already had me concerned) were not needed in Frankfurt, only in Berlin. Um, why would it matter where you applied? No one seemed to know.

The other tidbit is that the local visa service said that because the duration of this visa was over three months, they could not take care of the visa for me and I would need to physically present myself at the Russian consulate in Frankfurt, which naturally does not accept appointments in advance. It also wasn't clear whether they would speak English. Lovely.... So I was set to just show up on Thursday morning when they opened and hope for the best.

Lucky for me, one of the professionals in our group in Frankfurt (I will call her Lyudmila) is Russian and trilingual and has visited the consulate before. She described the situation outside the consulate as having a gated area where everyone just crowds together. A guy comes out and speaks in Russian, and you essentially have to push your way to the front and yell out (in Russian) that you are there for a visa and then perhaps he'll let you through the gate. This did not sound very promising for a non-Russian speaker and someone who is generally not physically assertive in crowd situations. Fortunately, though, Lyudmila took pity on me and agreed to go with me the following morning.

The situation was exactly as she described it. She positioned us outside the gated area near the exit door in the wrought iron gate, and when the guy came out she called out about the visa and he let us in the exit. Just like that. We then headed to the visa area, waited a relatively short period, gave the guy my paperwork, he had us go to the cashier to pay the fee, and then he gave us some sort of a receipt and said that maybe the visa would be ready the following Tuesday. Maybe.

The upside of this is that I suddenly had an extra weekend in Frankfurt, though this was less appealing since I no longer had an apartment with furniture in it. The downside, of course, is that there was still no certainty on when I would be able to go to Russia, not to mention that I was supposed to be out-of-town in meetings Tuesday afternoon through Thursday morning (yes, more traveling sans passport) and, oh yeah, Thursday morning was another Russian holiday and likely the consulate would also take Friday off. So if the visa wasn't available on Tuesday morning, I likely wouldn't be able to collect it until the following Monday unless they would accept someone else picking it up.

There is yet another additional twist to the process. The visa that I was applying for would get me back into Russia, but there was still the matter of getting the official work permit itself. So because the visa was premised on my getting said work permit, I needed to have an in-person meeting with the FMS (Federal Migration Service) within three business days of arriving. Which might be fine if I got the visa on Tuesday and could indeed fly to Russia on Friday. But if I had to wait until the following Monday to get the visa, there would not be time to get to Russia, have the meeting with the FMS, and then get to Amsterdam in time for meetings that were supposed to begin on Tuesday evening.

If you're confused by this point, you would not be alone. I felt like I was a pawn of some kind in a giant critical path chart with multiple activities that kept getting changed and the critical path was getting longer and longer by the day. Unpleasant.

Lyudmila and I were back at the consulate in Frankfurt at the crack of dawn (okay, shortly before it opened at 9 AM) on Tuesday. Same crowded gate scenario, though this time we did have to elbow our way to the front of the queue rather than being let in through the exit door. Miraculously, the visa was ready and I was able to fly to Russia on Friday.

Believe it or not, though, this long entry is far from the entire story. The saga of the related logistics is perhaps even longer and will be the source of future blogs, though they will hopefully be a little less boring!