Sri Lanka police introduces SMS service to track status of Police Clearance Certificate
Sri Lanka Police on its 145th anniversary yesterday, launched a new service of SMS to track the status of the Police Clearance Certificates (PCCs).
The SMS service, named as Police Clearance Certificate Status Tracking SMS Service, is offered in collaboration with the Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) .
The new service will benefit persons who request police certificates for various purposes such as local and foreign employment.
Under the new system applicants can type PLC(space)CRT followed by the assigned reference number on their mobile phone and send it to 1919 to find out the status of their PCCs.
The new Sri Lankan Police Clearance system was unfortunately not designed to speed up the process versus simply to provide an automated status solution to the growing burden of daily status requests calls the agency receives.
Just prior to this new system the turn around time was running up to 70-90 days. Inquiries as to status through the new system will fall into one of the following categories:
1. The investigation about the application is in progress,
2. Investigation is completed,
3. The clearance certificate has been issued.
In the end it’s still an improvement from not being able to determine the status of PCC requests i.e. confirmation of receipt or if a clearance has even been issued yet.