Where can the visa center come from so many special charges?

If you pay a few hundred yuan, you can use the "green channel" to avoid queuing, translate bank statements for 90 yuan per page, have your passport "delivered to your door" for 65 yuan, and text message reminders for 15 yuan... According to media reports, Ms. Li recently When applying for a visa at the Shanghai Visa Center, in addition to the visa fee, the staff repeatedly promoted various additional services for various reasons under a set process. The charging standards were much higher than the market price. It was simply a "chain", step by step. Shocking.

"Prime time service fee", "photography service fee", "photocopying service fee"... The visa center has more than a dozen high-charge items, which is dazzling, and the fees range from dozens of yuan. They range from hundreds to thousands of yuan, but all are far above the normal market price. Take the express delivery fee as an example. 65 yuan is equivalent to the express delivery fee for items weighing more than 25 kilograms in the market. This passport is really "heavy". Not to mention that the cost of a 10-yuan text message here actually costs 15 yuan.

Of course, if you don’t want to pay for the courier fee, you can just pick it up yourself. However, the self-pickup time is only from 8:00 to 9:00 on weekdays, and it is limited to one hour. No waiting will be done after the expiration date. How can office workers be free during this time? It is clear that we will squeeze the citizens’ right to choose when applying for visas and force them to pay.

Of course, the visa center is not a public service organization and can determine the service price itself. According to a person from the consulate: Visas for various countries are issued by the consulate, and the visa center is only an acceptance agency. Due to the limited staff of the consulate, the workload of processing a large number of visa application materials is too heavy. The visa center first assists in preliminary document review. The actual visa center Acting as an "intermediary agency". The fees charged by the visa center are theoretically divided into two parts: one is the visa fee charged on behalf of the consulate, which is clearly marked and published on the official website of each consulate; the other is the service fee charged by the visa center, which has the pricing power.

Since the Shanghai Visa Center is the only institution authorized to handle visa services in Shanghai, it has naturally formed a monopoly position of "one company alone and no other company". Visa services are necessities for many citizens. When necessities encounter a non-competitive market, it is easy for service providers to charge exorbitant prices, leaving citizens with no room for negotiation.

In fact, precisely because the visa center is the only window to provide visa services to citizens, it determines that it has a quasi-public service attribute. Therefore, service providers are not allowed to "speak for themselves" and must Taking into account the rights and interests of citizens who come to handle business, the local pricing department cannot just sit idly by.

Who is going to solve the high-charge “chain” of visa centers? It is necessary for the local price department to actively perform its duties and intervene to clean up the high-charge additional services of the visa center. Those that should be banned should be banned, and those that need to be retained, such as "express service fees", should be implemented with government price limits that are basically the same as market prices or Government-guided price. Only in this way can we avoid monopolistic institutions that ignore the rights and interests of citizens and charge exorbitant prices.

Relevant departments must intervene where they should, and the monopoly industry cannot be allowed to do whatever they want.