A quiet village scene from Lablu’s hometown

Lablu (name changed) sends us several photos – scenes from his village – to show us how happy he is that he is finally home. It’s been a long and stressful wait before his injury claim was finally concluded.

“My boss didn’t want to take care of me, or help me with anything,” he tells us, summing up his months of frustration. “I had to wait for a long time. I could not work and had no money.”

But it was not just him who was in financial distress. His dependents too were in serious difficulties. “I could not send money to my family – my wife, my children. They were not happy because of that.”

Feeling helpless even though he was the breadwinner, “It was not a good feeling.”

This is Lablu’s story of ridiculous delays in processing his work injury compensation claim. It took a year out of his life, during which he couldn’t work, nor could he go home.

Lablu was injured on 9 September 2023. A little over four months later, in late January 2024, his doctor at Tan Tock Seng Hospital judged that his recovery had gone as far as it could and had stabilised, and the patient’s degree of permanent disability could be assessed. The doctor wrote a memo to the employer saying that Lablu was ready for compensation.

Almost twelve months after that, in December 2024, Lablu was still in Singapore and still waiting for his compensation. He had spent a year dealing with delays, which does not put Singapore’s work injury compensation system in a good light.

How it’s supposed to work

These are the key steps or stages in a work injury compensation claim:

  • Employers are required to report to the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) accidents in which employees have been injured, within ten days of employer’s first knowledge of the accident. See link https://www.mom.gov.sg/workplace-safety-and-health/work-accident-reporting/what-and-when-to-report. The relevant by-law is Section 3(1) of the Work Injury Compensation Regulations 2020.
  • Employers should have insurance coverage for medical treatment and compensation.
  • When recovery has reached a plateau, a worker is assessed for the degree of permanent disability that remains.
  • The insurer makes an offer of compensation; it is up to the injured worker to accept or not.

Despite this elegant scheme, in TWC2’s experience, too many work injury cases fail to proceed smoothly for a variety of reasons, though rarely are two cases alike. Lablu’s is typical in some ways, and untypical in other ways, but it is a story worth telling, leaving a man in limbo and without income for over a year, not for medical reasons, but due to administrative breakdowns. In other words, the economic damage done to him and his family was entirely avoidable and unjustified.

The accident, surgery and reporting

Lablu was cutting wood using a machine. His right thumb was sliced open, exposing bone. The company quickly took him on their lorry to Tan Tock Seng Hospital where he underwent surgery the same evening.

When he came to TWC2 for the first time on 17 January 2024 for some advice, it was already more than three months after the accident. He knew there should be some kind of insurance process, but he was unclear what, if anything, was going on with his case.

The first thing our volunteers did was to see if a work injury compensation claim had commenced. Had the employer even reported the accident to the authorities? We found that they had not, even though the rule is that the authorities should be notified within ten days. It’s not as if the employer was not aware of the accident; that cannot be the case since the company lorry was used to transport Lablu to the hospital.

Unfortunately, failure to report is a rather common occurrence, going by TWC2’s experience with workers’ cases. A recent story on this site reported the same thing in another worker’s case; see Fifty kilos of cement and how law can turn into farce. We have not seen, in recent memory, any instance of employers prosecuted for failing to do so, even though the law sets out a fine of up to $5,000 for the first offence ($10,000 with possibility of imprisonment for subsequent offences). Why enforcement appears invisible remains a mystery.

Since the law also allows a worker to notify the ministry himself, we advised Lablu to do so in person the next day. He did as advised, and so, three months after the accident, the process finally began. And just in time too, for later the same month (January), the doctor said Lablu was ready to be assessed for compensation.

Yet nothing happened.

TWC2 and Lablu checked MOM’s information system three weeks later on 7 February. We could see a file number issued for Lablu’s claim, but no insurer was listed against it. If MOM didn’t have the insurer’s name on file, MOM would obviously be asking the employer for this information together with other required details about the incident. If that was the case, was the employer dragging their feet? It was already four months after the accident, three weeks after Lablu reported to MOM, and well past the ten-day reporting rule written into law. Was MOM not stern with the employer for the delay?

TWC2 wrote to MOM asking about the case. We did not get any reply.

Food, housing and physiotherapy

Over the following month, new issues cropped up, and Lablu had to appeal to TWC2 for help repeatedly. The employer stopped providing money for food and housing. However, our story won’t go in the details of this to avoid sidetracking.

There was also the matter of physiotherapy for which appointments suddenly ceased. We enquired with the hospital and learned that the employer was behind on payments – but the hospital agreed to give Lablu an open date so he could resume physiotherapy if he needed.

“Employer made wrong report”

Helping Lablu make a follow-up check on MOM’s information system, we saw on 15 March that at last an insurer was named in the claim record: Etiqa. However, six weeks later, at the end of April, Lablu got a call from MOM and among other things said in the call was the mention that the employer had made a “wrong report”. Lablu didn’t question what exactly that meant, but we would later figure out that it probably had something to do with naming the wrong insurance company.

The correct insurance company would be NTUC Income…. except that, when we contacted NTUC Income on Lablu’s behalf, the person we spoke to said they had no record of any claim under Lablu’s name or MOM’s claim reference number. The employer, they said, had ceased to be a client of theirs some time ago. We urged them to do a thorough check and we wrote to them with all details that we had. Eventually, they must have found it because it was NTUC Income processing the claim in the months ahead.

“Under investigation”

Then virtually everything went into a standstill again. There was no discernible progress. The status shown on MOM’s information system was “under investigation” well into October. This indicated that the insurer was still trying to ascertain whether this was a valid workplace injury and within the scope of the policy. It was ridiculous for an investigation to be taking so long when matter should be cut and dried: the accident happened while Lablu was using a machine at the worksite on a workday; he was taken to hospital on the company’s vehicle. Either the employer was stonewalling the insurer’s questions or the insurer’s internal processes were slower than a snail’s pace. And nobody seemed to care.

We don’t know if MOM has any system for monitoring progress and flagging slow-moving cases. If MOM has any deadlines for insurers to do their jobs, those deadlines must be pretty lax.

Lablu had emailed NTUC Income in May to ask about progress but received no reply. We helped him draft another email in October. And still, there was no reply.

In November, we had to write to MOM again, pointing out the lack of response or action.

What followed was amazingly swift by the standards of this case. Just one day later, NTUC Income called TWC2 and we learned from them that the employer was uncooperative and had not provided any information to the insurer. That apparently was enough to put a case on perpetual hold – a situation that cries out for better policy-making, monitoring and enforcement on MOM’s side.

NTUC Income claimed that they had “only just found out” that Lablu had been waiting for action since September 2023, with no work, no medical leave wages, nor expenses paid for. On top of that, they added, they only realised that he had been ready for assessment since January 2024. At least NTUC Income agreed that it was a bad situation.

Things began to move in the two weeks after that, though they were not visible to us until later. By early December, the employer asked Lablu for his documents. Perhaps they had finally been “motivated” to cooperate. We helped our client organise copies of his documents so he could pass them on to his employer – these materials would have been meant for the insurer.

Conclusion

In January, we heard from Lablu that, finally, an offer of compensation was made to him and he had (after some negotiation) accepted. He went home in January 2025.

Despite that happy ending, the path this case took was still unacceptably slow. From a medical treatment point of view, Lablu’s case was ready by January 2024. Even allowing for a couple of months to tie up any loose administrative ends, the entire case should have been concluded by around March or April. That it took till January 2025, and even then, only with a lot of kicking and screaming, was plainly unacceptable.

One may be tempted so say this was an isolated case of an uncooperative employer, but the story suggests that processes and oversight at the insurer’s and MOM’s were also not up to scratch. And if our experience with other injury cases is anything to go by – and another story about another such case will soon be published – delays like this are hardly “isolated” cases at all.

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