Visa saga part 3: tax records special!

My trip to the US Embassy was quite an experience.

The debacle really started while organising a time to go to the embassy and get the O-1 visa processed. Visa petitioners have to make a pre-arranged appointment (so far, so gravy), these appointments can only occur at 8am (inconvenient, but acceptable), and the appointment “hot-line” costs £1.20 per minute. One pound twenty per minute!? I was living on that much per day in Nicaragua.

On top of that, the ludicrously expensive phone call culminates in you authorising them to take a further $131 as a Machine Readable Visa fee, whatever that is. What are they doing which costs $131? Doesn’t machine-readable just mean a barcode? Specially formatted text, like we have on passports? An RFID tag at a push?

Onto the actual appointment itself. One of the warnings included in the appointment confirmation is that you are required to wait outside “even in inclement weather”, so I was quite pleased to find it a clement, if nippy, morning in Grosvenor Square.

Other warnings include the restrictions on electronics in the embassy: no mobile phones, laptops; even USB sticks are verboten. After enjoying my traditional English queue, the security drone’s eyes lit up when I produced a few coins and a pair of headphones from my pocket before going through the metal detector.

“You can’t take those into the embassy, sir”, he japed. “Ha ha, good show”, I chortled heartily. Unfortunately, the steely, lifeless eyes framed in his frozen, mirthless visage made it all too clear that he was actually serious. The headphones posed a threat to national security.

“Those could be used as a transmitting device”, he asserted with a mind-bending mix of inaccuracy and self-assurance. Not wishing to get down to the brass tacks of just how egregiously incorrect he was, I conceded defeat, and paid £5 (five sterling) to store the headphones in a plastic bag for an hour.

Security checkpoint cleared, I was in the building. After a modest wait, I was called for an interview with a chap from Texas. He seemed perfectly happy with all the O-1 visa stuff; perfectly happy until it came to tax records. As I’d spent a few months in the US last year, paid for in part by my company, it now appears that full tax records for me and the company are required reading for some lucky State Department employee.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we really have any tax records… We haven’t paid anyone any money, and I haven’t been paid any money, so there are no IRS filings. We have an ID for the company and an ID for me, with no documents associated with either. Still! I suppose in a way this is what they’re looking for: proof that I haven’t been paid. It just seems a little fallacious to prove something by producing a lack of evidence.

So this means that I’ll need to come back to the UK again, after my trip to Austin. On the bright side, it should be super-simple from here on – the hard part is over. All I need to do is mail in all the required documents (or lack of them), in a nice big envelope to really emphasise the volume of tax records which don’t exist, wait for them to check that the envelope really is empty, stamp the old passport and I’ll be heading back to Cali.