“Come to my shop at 5pm. Bring 5 lakh.” (This is an AI-generated image)

Between 1 December 2024 and 26 April 2025, a period of about five months, TWC2 saw 13 workers who were on Training Employment Passes. We have never before seen so many workers on this kind of work pass in such a short time. Nearly all of them complained about salary irregularities, but at least one of them pointed to long working hours as his biggest problem. However, when we found out more about the circumstances which led to their working in Singapore, we could see the contours of a rapidly widening job scam.

As at the date of writing, most of the victimised men have filed salary cases at the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) and in several instances, TWC2 case officers have also written in to MOM. We hope the ministry acts quickly to shut down these scams before more individuals are victimised.

Of the 13 cases in these five months, six were from India, six from Bangladesh and one from Myanmar. This suggests that there are multiple scammers using the same modus operandi, since the affected workers report that they spoke to their agents in their native languages.

Five of the victims were put to work in a food & beverage establishment, five in a warehouse. Two were placed with cleaning companies and one worked in a company described as a “tour coach agency” – we’re not sure what job he was actually doing.

There was a 14th worker (from India), also with a Training Employment Pass, but it was a rather different kind of scam, involving a forged In-Principle Approval document. For this reason, he is considered outside the scope of this article.

Whilst the case histories of the 13 men varied from one man to another, there were many similarities as well. Below, we will describe the common tactics their agents and employers used, but first, we need to explain what we know about this category of work pass: the Training Employment Pass.

The Training Employment Pass

This page on MOM’s website explains it. The pass is meant for “Eligible foreign students or foreign trainees who want to undergo training in Singapore.” The maximum period of stay is three months and is non-renewable. The minimum salary is $3,000 a month. This pass seems to have minimum educational requirements, but even though the webpage speaks of this in loose terms, our sense is that a university degree may be needed.

Unlike Work Permits or S-Passes, there is no quota restriction.

Basically, one can intuit that the intent for Training Employment Passes is to provide short-term training or participation in corporate attachment programmes to foreign individuals whose career is or will be in management or a high-level profession.

In common with all work passes, the process for getting a Training Employment Pass is like this:

  • The prospective employer makes an online application to the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) for a Training Employment Pass;
  • Various supporting documents may need to be submitted as well;
  • If approved, MOM issues an In-Principle Approval (IPA) letter to the employer which comes in two versions: there is a bundle for the employer, and a different bundle for the proposed employee; some pages in the Employer’s Bundle do not appear in the Employee’s Bundle and vice versa;
  • Both bundles are sent to the employer and it is the responsibility of the employer to send the Employee’s Bundle to the employee;
  • The employee uses the IPA as a visa to enter Singapore;
  • The employer must make an appointment with MOM within two weeks of the employee’s arrival to convert the IPA to a proper Training Employment Pass.

Common features of the cases

The men – and all 13 cases involved men – were generally told the following before they accepted the jobs:

  • A reasonably truthful description of the type of work they would be doing, whether in a food establishment or warehouse;
  • That this was a temporary pass for three months (correct);
  • That in fact they would be able to work four or five months (incorrect);
  • Or that the three months’ temporary work pass was renewable at least one time, making for six months’ of work (incorrect);
  • That there would be some way to continue working beyond that (incorrect);
  • An agent’s fee of about $3,000 to $5,000 would be payable (in their home country).

Less consistent were these other features:

Some men were told that the salary would be $3,000 a month, but other men were told a lower figure, usually around $1,600 or $1,800. Should the men notice that the salary stated in the IPA documentation was $3,000, the men might be told that this was merely “for government purpose” or something like that. Coming from countries where all kinds of work-arounds or corruption were the norm, the men didn’t delve further into such explanations.

Likewise, some men noticed that the IPA’ stated jobs description – usually “Management executive” – differed from what they understood their jobs to be, but none of our 13 men saw that discrepancy as an issue. They just assumed that that is just another routine work-around that ordinary folks (their employers) had to resort to to cope with the minutiae of government rules.

Some men were told that after three or six months (i.e. after one renewal), if the employer was happy with one’s work, the migrant worker would be sent for a course to get a skills certificate, and then he would qualify for a longer-term work visa. Other men might be given the hope of transitioning into a longer-term work visa without any mention of training. Such assurances would be completely false.

The reality after arrival tended to have these features:

  • They would be put to work almost immediately, e.g. the day of arrival or the day after;
  • They were paid less than $3,000 a month despite this minimum fixed salary being stated on the IPA;
  • They were paid in cash, so there would be an evidential weakness should they want to make a claim;
  • They worked horrendous hours, e.g. 14 hours a day, seven days a week;
  • They would have to pay for their own transport and accommodation – easily adding up to $600 or more a month;
  • They would not be sent to MOM for the mandatory step of issuing the Training Employment Pass until nearly 30 days after arrival.

The last point is particularly significant. Making them work the first month without getting the pass issued was a way to get four months’ work out of each man; in other words, a way to get around the three-month limitation of the pass. However, this is illegal, because the IPA documention clearly states that the subject person should not be working until after the pass has been issued. The workers either did not pay attention to this sentence in the documentation or they were given assurances that that condition is routinely ignored in Singapore (false). Again, coming from countries with a different bureaucratic working culture, this is entirely credible to the workers. In any case, they depended on their employer to get an appointment with MOM and to send them there for card issuance. If the employer made no effort to get an appointment with MOM, whose fault was it?

This may however prove a problem when workers later file salary claims. Do they include the first month within their claim period? If they do, they risk being accused of working illegally.

Things come crashing down

As the expiry date of the Training Employment Pass approached, the worker might ask his employer about the promised renewal or extension. Met with silence, he would realise that earlier promises had been false and that he was now facing a big problem. By then too, he would also be frustrated over salary short-payments and the excessive hours. And that’s usually when they come to TWC2.

Naturally, we try our best to help them get justice, but unlike the relatively more straightforward salary cases filed by Work Permit holders – where there is generally nothing illicit about their work passes – with Training Employment Pass holders, there are several complications which make their cases far trickier.

Firstly, there is risk, as mentioned above, in trying to claim for salary short-payment for work done during the first month.

Secondly, if we dig deeper we often find that false educational certificates would have been submitted at the time of application for the Training Employment Pass. We typically find declarations (made by the employer) that the employee had a university degree. However such a declaration is usually inside the Employer’s Bundle which the typical employee would never have seen. The Employee Bundles that workers show us do not have any indication of what educational certificates were submitted.

We’re not sure if the employer (or agent) making the application merely declared the educational qualifications on behalf of the employee, or also had to forge diplomas and degrees for submission to MOM. It might have varied from case to case. If there was forgery, whilst in theory it could have been the worker who produced the fake certificates and who then forwarded them to the prospective employer for submission to MOM, we think this extremely unlikely. Just about all the workers consulting with us were shocked to hear that false declarations had been made on their behalf regarding their qualifications. In one instance, the writer saw a worker literally turn pale when informed of this. Also, none of them seemed to have the photoshop skills to produce forgeries – nor had they ever seen what a college or university certificate even looked like. Some could barely spell English words correctly.

Even so, we have some concerns about the process of issuing work passes when employees are brought to MOM. Besides having their thumbprints and photos taken, workers have reported being asked to “write my name on a tablet/screen”. It is rare that any of them know the significance of that. To Singaporeans, it sounds as if they are asked to sign off on something, but to migrants from third-world countries, less digitised than Singapore, the concept of signing e-documents with a signature traced with a finger on a tablet is very foreign. So what were they asked to sign? Were they asked to confirm that the salary and the job description stated in the IPA were the same as what they had agreed to? Were they asked to confirm that the educational qualifications submitted by the employer were true?

Thirdly, unlike salary claims filed by Work Permit holders, where the law is clear that the employer has to continue to house the worker, provide meals and healthcare (if needed), no such provision is written into law for salary claimants who had earlier been on Training Employment Passes. If the claim is prolonged, how is the poor chap going to sustain himself? This angle could quickly become a perverse incentive for the employer to stonewall any claim, dragging out the process until the worker gives up (which may not take long), but if so, then what Singapore has is a system that rewards the scammer and exploiter.

Fourthly, who pays for the worker’s flight ticket home? We can’t find anything in law that makes it the employer’s responsibility.

Why would employers choose this short-term arrangement?

At first glance, it is a bit of a head-scratcher why employers would (mis)use the Training Employment Pass to get low-skill workers. With a duration of only three months, the staff turnover that results would create a lot of work for them in hiring and training.

However, that these cases are cropping up in the food industry, cleaning and warehouse sectors, gives us a clue: the employers are desperate for staff, but Work Permit quotas are extremely limited for these industry sectors. Employers probably feel that they have no choice but to hire using Training Employment Passes. There are no quota restrictions for this class of Pass, nor, to the best of our knowledge, any requirement to pay a monthly levy.

Moreover, unlike Work Permit workers in the Construction, Marine engineering and Process industries especially, there is no requirement for employers to bear the cost of housing, healthcare or repatriation. The Training Employment Pass scheme assumes that these are management-level trainees, paid at least $3,000, financially comfortable and educated enough to deal with such matters on their own.

These cost savings, together with the possibility of taking a cut of the agent’s fees – say, getting a $3,000 cut every time a new worker is recruited, repeated every three or four months – make the entire scheme very attractive. The employer doesn’t even need to pay the full $3,000 monthly salary for the months the worker worked, relying on the fact should a worker complain about that, stonewalling will take care of the problem.

Forced labour and human trafficking violations

These job scams almost surely breach Singapore’s commitments to international conventions in three important ways:

Firstly, workers had to pay thousands of dollars to get these jobs. Whilst payments are typically made to agents, there is a strong likelihood, going by what we have seen of recruitment fees paid by Work Permit holders, that employers or management personel of employer companies take a cut of the spoils. If employers are taking a cut of the spoils, the Debt Bondage question is triggered. Even if employers are not taking a cut, the issue of Abuse of Vulnerability comes up. For example, these workers are made to work very long hours, often seven days a week, and they find themselves unable to resist such employer demands because they fear losing their jobs altogether and failing to recover the financial investment they had made to get work in the first place.

Secondly, the horrendously long hours itself is a breach of the Excessive Overtime indicator in the International Labour Organisation’s Forced Labour Convention No. 29. There is a similar indicator for human trafficking.

Thirdly, there is Deception in recruitment. Assurances are given to workers that although on paper the Training Employment Pass is only for three months, in fact they can work longer. And also that the Pass can be renewed (it cannot) or the worker can transition to other more permanent kinds of work passes.

Fourthly, workers have a fear of Denunciation to the authorities. What this means is that after fake educational certificates have been declared in their name and after they have been made to work the first month without first getting a Training Employment Pass issued, they risk being penalised by the State even if it was the employer who initiated these transgressions. Disempowerment through fear of being denounced to the authorities is an indicator of human trafficking.

Ultimately, these are not just cases of cheating or making false declarations to the government. They go beyond that. As explained in the blue box, many features of such scams bring Singapore into non-compliance with the forced labour and human trafficking standards that we have signed up to. MOM needs to take action, and now. They can begin by asking any employer who applies for a Training Employment Pass exactly what the trainee is supposed to do, and why the company sees itself as so well positioned to provide management training.

See also our follow-up article: Management executives washing dishes – media coverage and more.

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