Hi,

I joined my company almost a year ago(Sept 2003) and everything went well with the transfer of my Green-card etc...
But last month I got a letter from Amtsgericht Potsdam that I started work without a proper permit and I have to pay a fine of 250 Euro for working 15 days as Schwarzarbeit !

My employer has also received a similar letter from the court, but he has his own lawyer and insurance cover and has asked me for find a lawyer to fight the case.
He introduced me to a lawyer, who quoted me 550 Euro as her fees. She said its normal in germany and adviced me that I can also go to the court without a lawyer and say that I agree to my employeer's lawyer and that I wasn't aware that something was not in order OR just simply accept the fine and get rid of the case !

Firstly I don't want to accept, bcoz I haven't done anything wrong. Before joining the company I had sent the complete set of documents needed for the new GC transfer. Secondly if I go thru a lawyer it will be very expensive and there is no guarantee that I'll win, in that case I have to pay the fine too !!!

I heard that there's a Lawyers Guild from the Govt. who fight for you at nominal fees...
If anybody has any information about this or know a better way to get out of this, please reply !!!

P.S: Pls ignore the spelling and grammatical mistakes, I was tensed and wrote this in bit of a hurry !

Regards,
Trustme

How did the Amtsgericht "knew" that you were working "without a proper permit" ?

D.

I guess there was some delay in communication between the Auslanderbehörde and the Arbeitsamt Potsdam. Since the don't want to blame each other, they are blaming me :-(

Regards,
Trustme

The arbeitsamt routinely controls all papers at the end of the year to insure that they are adjusted to the law. If you got a letter from them it's because some permit has a time gap that can not be explained. Normally they will give you the opportunity to write a letter of discharge where you explain exactly what happened (notice that it's your responsibility that your papers are in order, if there is a delay in the process, normally you should not have begun working until you had gotten a confirmation of your status). However, if you write back (in german) explaining the situation in an honest and detailed way, when you and your employer have a meeting with the officer in charge of your case, they may reduce your fine to something like 50 euro, or if it really was not your fault, the process may be terminated.



Good luck.

Man, I think I just got the same problem now: I've started working in May and something like end of May, I send the papers (copy of my visa, copy of my contract and the filled form) to Arbeitsamt Köln and they didn't get back to me.
After inquiries, I found out that the papers never arrived there, I was just thinking that they were a bit leasy treating the papers.
I then went and asked for a new form that I gave to my employer one more time, he filled it and I bring that there ad there comes the proble: the woman I met there told me that I've worked all this time without a proper permit and that I should get in trouble for that, I will have to wait and they will be sending me a Bescheid in the coming days.

That's quite stressful because I'm supposed to start in a new company in 2 days and I sent all the forms 3 weeks ago without an answer, each week that I called, they were telling me "call next week, we got a lot to do" until last Thursday when they just told me to go there by myself, which I will be doing either tomorrow if I got the chance to reach Berlin in time or in the 2 coming days.

Sad to say but I really don't like this. Anyone got an advice?

D.