Internal UGent administration

Before starting your employment or research at Ghent University, we must receive some personal information about you. This is for example : detailed personal information as you’re current address, family information, a copy of your passport, copies of your diploma’s and proof of previous employment by a certificate. All these documents are requested with the purpose for internal registration and will allow us to foresee in a correct salary payment, family that is taken into account for taxation or the applicable seniority is taken into account.

Passport or a European ID card

A colored copy of the passport or ID card must be provided by all NON-EEA and EEA nationals to identify themselves. In case you hold several passports, it is advised to provide the European Passport which will give you the easiest way to access the European Area and Schengen states. The passport must be valid until six months after arrival in Belgium. If your passport will expire during your stay in Belgium, a new passport can be requested at your countries’ embassy based in Belgium.

Obtained diploma’s

A master or PhD might be requested for your specific position at the University. These conditions are mentioned in the vacancy. In some situations, a translation and legalization is required and equivalence from NARIC might also be requested.

Fiscal declaration on dependent family

A part of the monthly salary is withheld as income tax: the withholding tax. If you have children (or in exceptional cases, other family members) whose expenses are fiscally considered to be your responsibility, you are entitled to a reduction in the withholding tax for family responsibilities and therefore a higher net salary.

If you have one or more dependents, you will receive a tax benefit, namely an increase in your tax-free minimum. This means that a larger part of your income is not taxed and that your tax owed therefore decreases. It is therefore important to know which persons you can consider as dependents from a tax point of view.

If you are married or legally cohabiting and both you and your partner have a professional income, the reduction in withholding tax for family responsibilities (children or other persons) can only be applied to one of the partners. In this case, your employer can only apply the reduction if you officially inform him that you wish benefit from it.

This communication must be in the form of an official statement, to be signed by both partners, in which one partner (male or female) expressly waives the reduction in withholding tax, and the other partner opts to be allocated the reduction.

Proof of previous employment

For paid employees the salary payment level can only be set when all proof from earlier employers have been collected to determine the length of the scientific career. Therefore, employment certificates of your former employers are requested at the start of your employment. The certificates must be translated and hold an end date of the previous employment.

The proof of previous employment is not applicable for post-doctoral scholarship, and for PhD scholarships only a limited previous experience can be taken in to account. Researchers who come with own funding are also not considered to become an employee and therefore do not have to provide these documents.

Information on your family

If you have a family, we request you to provide the information of your family and if they will be joining you to Belgium (in case of living abroad). The legal status must be proven by a marriage certificate or official cohabitation document for family reunion registration procedures within Belgium.

More information on the family reunion procedures can be found here.