Even if they’re legit, can they be trusted?

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“This one, how can [it be] my mistake?” asked a migrant worker from India as he showed us a letter from the Ministry of Manpower (MOM). Our worker was bewildered, and unhappy.

To be fair, no one said it was his mistake, but still he would be the one (besides the employer) who was going to bear the loss.

Our worker attended a skills upgrade course at PSU Global Pte Ltd in 2018. He paid $1,000 for it. The course concluded with an examination which, our worker says, was conducted at the Building and Construction Authority Academy, with his performance at the exam observed through video. After that, he was certified as a higher-skilled worker which would have improved his employability.

Employers who hire higher-skilled workers enjoy lower rates for the foreign worker levy. The scheme is meant to encourage skills improvement and productivity.

Then, years after taking the course and the exam, his employer – an airconditioning company, judging by the company’s name – received a letter from MOM saying:

… your workers have been found to have obtained higher-skilled status under BCA’s Multi-Skilling Scheme using fraudulently issued Workplace Safety and Health Training (WSH) certificates from PSU Global Pte Ltd (PSUG).

MOM’s investigation on PSUG found that it had conducted shortened safety courses, issued fraudulent safety certificates for non-attendees, and allowed trainers to register the workers as higher-skilled with BCA, enabling them to wrongly enjoy the lower levy rates.

The letter said MOM would downgrade the worker (and others in a similar position) to basic-skilled status on 1 November 2024. This meant not only that the higher levy would be imposed on the employer from that date, MOM would also “be recovering the difference in levy between the basic-skilled (R2) and higher-skilled (R1) levy rates for your workers (including former workers) … ” for the preceding years.

If our worker was taken aback by this turn of events, the employer, now facing a significant financial liability, must be reeling in shock.

At no point was MOM saying that this particular worker obtained his certification fraudulently. What the letter suggested was that the authorities found instances of cutting corners in the conduct of the courses or cheating. The instances might not have affected all trainees, but understandably, none of PSUG’s certificates could anymore be trusted.

There was little that TWC2 could do to help this man, except to advise that he now needed to take another course to get himself recertified. If he was confident of his skills, he should have no difficulty passing a new exam.

Six years later

Curious about PSU Global, We did a quick search about the company. We found that it was registered in 2017 with an address in Woodlands. Our man took his course in 2018.

But the company was struck off the Companies Register in 2020. Why, we do not know. All we can see is that it filed its last Annual Return in July 2019, for the financial year ending 31 December 2018. We don’t know if it continued to operate (illegally) after that, but it seems unlikely.

We reckon that whichever workers who were issued certificates fraudulently must have been trainees no later than 2020. Yet, it was only now in November 2024 that MOM was taking action. Either MOM had come to know of monkey business quite long ago but took up to four years to investigate or MOM had no knowledge about the monkey business for four years or more and only lately was made aware of it. Neither scenario is confidence-inspiring.

It’s hardly any wonder that our worker sounded bewildered, stressing that he “finished course on 6 years before”.

Not an isolated case

It was only a few months ago when we wrote about training centre scams, in the article Training centres: another way to rip off migrant workers. Indeed, complaints about training centres reach us fairly regularly. In the previous story too, the two affected workers encountered dishonourable behaviour by the training centres they signed up with, behaviour they had no way to detect till after they had paid.

This whole training business for migrant workers in Singapore seems to be a snake pit attracing unscrupulous operators, eager to enrich themselves through ripping off some of the most vulnerable workers here. Although there is regulation – BCA licenses training centres and supervises the examinations – that these complaints keep coming up suggests that regulation may be with too light a touch.

Singapore has infrastructure for technical training. Our ITE colleges are well-respected, but they don’t get involved in the courses that migrant workers need. For example, if one visits the site https://www.ite.edu.sg/courses and then searches for courses related to industry sector: built environment, there are, as at November 2024, only four courses in this field, three of which have course duration of two years or more. Only one course – Certificate of Competency in fibre optic cabling – is a 24-hour course.

Courses listed on ITE website, filtered for Built Environment. Screen capture 11 Nov 2024

Moreover, non-citizens do not enjoy subsidies even if, after completing the course, they work here and contribute to our economy.

The whole field of skills training is left open to private parties. Coupled with light regulation, some people with get-rich-quick ideas might see opportunity here.

Why won’t the State get more deeply invovled? After all, these are skills essential to our domestic construction industry. It’s not as if ITEs do not conduct short courses equipping trainees with very specific skills; they do, e.g. in fibre-optic cabling, as mentioned above. One senses a certain ideological stance as to what to provide and what not to provide. For a country that prides itself on pragmatism and doing what it takes to be efficient and free from corruption, choosing ideology over a pragmatic response to a need seems quite out of character.