Portugal's migration agency has signed a €237,200 contract with an outsourcing firm to manage its institutional email inboxes. According to Público, the contract reportedly sets a two-business-day target for responding to emails, and immigrants interviewed by the newspaper say the responses still aren't coming.
The contract
Público reports that AIMA (Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo) signed the contract with Synchro, serviços de Outsourcing, which sets a two-business-day deadline for responding to messages sent to the agency. Portugal's public procurement registry confirms a contract between AIMA and Synchro for "acquisition of institutional email inbox management services," dated May 19, 2026 and awarded through a competitive public tender rather than a no-bid arrangement. The same registry shows an earlier AIMA-Synchro contract dated March 20, 2026, though it isn't clear whether that covered the same service or something separate.
A familiar complaint
Complaints that AIMA doesn't respond to email or phone contact are not new, they've been a recurring feature of complaint platforms such as Portal da Queixa and DECO Proteste for well over a year, from applicants waiting months for a residency appointment, a document renewal, or simply an acknowledgment that their case is being handled. Whether this specific contract has actually changed that pattern is what Público's own reporting speaks to directly, its subheadline states plainly that immigrants say the promised responses aren't coming, even with the reported two-business-day response target.
Part of a wider pattern
This isn't the only recent sign of persistent communication and administrative problems at AIMA, based on other independently reported cases. Público reported in April that the agency owed lawyers and solicitors roughly €200,000–244,000 in overdue payments for work processing residency applications, this despite the state reportedly profiting some €62 million from the broader regularization procedure those same professionals were working through, according to CNN Portugal. Separately, AIMA has been tendering a €208,000 contract for a unified foreign-resident service system, expected to take about a year to build, after internal system failures reportedly left some applicants unable to renew documents before they expired.
Taken together, what's independently confirmed is that AIMA has repeatedly paid for fixes, a new IT system, an email-management contract, and legal support for processing residency applications, across the past two years. Whether any of them have resolved the underlying complaint from the people the agency serves is, per Público's reporting on this contract specifically, still an open question.
What's actually established, and what isn't
What's independently verifiable here is straightforward: the contract exists, it's worth €237,200, it was awarded to Synchro through a competitive public tender, and its stated purpose is managing AIMA's institutional email. Whether it has improved AIMA's responsiveness remains unclear. Público reports that immigrants it interviewed say they are still not receiving timely replies despite the contract's two-day service target. AIMA has not published data showing overall response times or whether the contractor is meeting its contractual objectives.