Cross-border workers: two-country files

Cross-border employment is ordinary around Geneva, Luxembourg and the Belgian and French borders. It makes document files quietly more complicated, and the complication is easy to miss until it stops you.

The rule people get wrong

Each document is endorsed by the country that issued it, not by the country where you are filing and not by the country where you live. Payslips from a Swiss employer follow the Swiss chain; a residence certificate from a French commune follows the French one; a Turkish register extract follows the Turkish one. Three documents in one file can mean three separate authorities.

Where files stall

Applicants take the whole bundle to one office and are told that only part of it can be handled there. Because the rejected documents then have to travel to a different country, the delay is measured in weeks rather than days. Sorting the bundle by issuing country before you start prevents this entirely.

Do it on paper first

List every document, and next to each write who issued it and in which country. That two-column list tells you how many chains you are running, and which one will be slowest — the only number that matters for planning. Start the slowest first; the others will catch up.

Employment and social security records

These are the documents most likely to cross borders. Where you have worked in more than one country, each system holds its own record, and no one system shows the whole picture. Expect to request from each. The Turkish equivalent, which covers all declared Turkish employment regardless of employer, is described on social security employment record.

Pensions

A career split across countries produces a pension file that runs through several institutions, each wanting evidence of what happened in the others. Our part is documentary: obtaining Turkish records, translating them and running the Turkish endorsement chain. How periods combine is a matter for the institutions and we do not interpret it.

Consistency across the file

With records from several countries, spellings and institution names drift easily. Send everything to be translated as one batch rather than piecemeal, so that a single term list governs the whole set.

What we handle

The Turkish end, wherever you live and wherever you work: retrieval on a power of attorney, endorsement at the correct Turkish counter, translation and tracked shipping.