Is Electronic Processing a bad idea?

[mtlguy 59]

I sent an EP enrollment email during the 3rd week of April. A quick call to NVC yesterday confirmed that the EP enrollment department is experiencing a higher than usual load of emails to process. That being said, the lady told me she really can't give me an accurate time estimated on when I would be receiving the OPT IN confirmation.

Let's assume I get it today, or sometimes this week: If I send the AOS and DS 260 docs by email, that means ending up at the tail end of the queue and waiting for another X weeks for the damn thing to be processed!!

That's a total of X (weeks for OPT IN confirmation) + Y (weeks for docs to looked at) + Z (weeks for the actual application to be evaluated).

I have seen other members who snail mailed their packages and had their documents scanned and in the system in less than 2 weeks.

Thoughts?

[mattandinga 5]

I sent an EP enrollment email during the 3rd week of April. A quick call to NVC yesterday confirmed that the EP enrollment department is experiencing a higher than usual load of emails to process. That being said, the lady told me she really can't give me an accurate time estimated on when I would be receiving the OPT IN confirmation.

Let's assume I get it today, or sometimes this week: If I send the AOS and DS 260 docs by email, that means ending up at the tail end of the queue and waiting for another X weeks for the damn thing to be processed!!

That's a total of X (weeks for OPT IN confirmation) + Y (weeks for docs to looked at) + Z (weeks for the actual application to be evaluated).

I have seen other members who snail mailed their packages and had their documents scanned and in the system in less than 2 weeks.

Thoughts?

To be clear, I am only speaking from our experience here given that we are recent EP filers as well.

Our eMail, be it initial enrollment or AOS and DS 260 docs took between 3 weeks and a month to be acknowledged. We did not wait for confirmation of EP enrollment prior to sending our AOS and DS 260 docs but rather sent these items once we submitted payment of the respective fees. From the time a case number was assigned to case complete took us 36 days and 2 false checklists. Once acknowledged, our documents were reviewed within 24 hours. To be clear, I am not referring to an out of office reply acknowledgement but rather an eMail sent by NVCElectronic stating "We received electronic documentation for this case."

I know of two other recent Canadian EP filers who also submitted documents prior to receiving confirmation of EP enrollment without issue as well.

For us, the most difficult part of EP filing was the wait for our eMailed documents to be acknowledged when others who mailed hard copy documents were being acknowledged within two weeks, here we were waiting and being told that our documents hadn't been received - Which was incorrect, our documents had been received and were waiting in queue to be acknowledged and added to our case to be forwarded for review. So where we lost time in waiting for our documents to be added to our file, we gained time in that the review of these documents happened very quickly after they were acknowledged where the opposite may be true for some "paper" filers.

HTH