In just two weeks of April alone, we came across three unusual cases. They’re not our run-of-the mill salary or injury cases, serious though these may be. These three unusual cases violate the rules or the ethics of employment, but they also show up the inadequacies of the system and regulatory processes, in that it is very hard to see how the Ministry of Manpower can deliver just resolution for these workers under their current operating protocols.
This is the third of three cases:
Arjun (name changed) wanted a better-paying job than the one he had in Kerala. He had worked over four years as a lathe operator (he has a diploma in Tool and Die) in his home state. Lots of people in Kerala go abroad to work. He decided he should join his peers. Even a low-status job abroad would pay better than what he was earning back home.
In the town of Coimbatore, just across the mountainous eastern border of Kerala state, but located in the neighbouring state of Tamilnadu, was a recruiter named Prakash. Arjun’s friend had been recruited by Prakash earlier and was now working in Malaysia. That gave Arjun confidence in Prakash’s role as recruiter.
For a payment of 240,000 Indian rupees (about $3,800), Prakash found him a job as a warehouse assistant in Singapore. Prakash told him it was only a three-month job, but somewhere it was mentioned, or Arjun was led to believe, that there are various ways to extend his stay whether in the same job or in another. The job would be with a company we will call “The Company” in this story. At this stage, we have no reason to think that the Company was involved in this scheme.
Prakash gave him this document (we have blurred out the personal details):
Such a document is called an In-Principle Approval (IPA). In Arjun’s case, it was for a three-month Training Employment Pass. As explained in the recent article “Management executives washing dishes”, such a work pass is meant for foreign trainees who want to undergo training in Singapore at a level roughly in keeping with the professional and managerial levels for which the longer-term work pass would be the Employment Pass. The rules for a Training Employment Pass state that the maximum period of stay is three months and is non-renewable. The minimum salary is $3,000 a month. Unlike Work Permits or S-Passes, there is no quota restriction.
There are several features of the above document that raised our suspicions when we would later see it, but we will come back to those features further in the story.
Arriving in Singapore
Arjun bought his own flight ticket and arrived in Singapore on 13 March 2025. He contacted a certain Venkat, whose contact number was earlier provided to him by Prakash. We would later see that Venkat submitted the digital SG Arrival Card on behalf of Arjun. Venkat declared his own WhatsApp number and email address on that arrival card.
Venkat then directed Arjun to a place where he could stay. And there Arjun stayed for slightly over a month, waiting for Venkat to give him directions to report for work.
Going by the letter of the law, Arjun was not allowed to start work (or training, to be precise) until the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) had issued him a credit-card-sized Training Employment Pass. That pass or card didn’t come through though Arjun didn’t know why. Because it was not delivered to him, it didn’t at first seem all that odd that Venkat wasn’t asking him to report for duty. Not knowing how Singapore’s bureaucracy worked, he simply continued to wait.
However, a bit after the 30th day, Arjun came to the view that something was not right. Venkat was no longer contactable. Arjun could see from the timeline stated in the documentation that the Pass should have been issued to him by then. He went to MOM for help.
Like us, it took only one look at his supposed IPA for the MOM officer to be suspicious.
“MOM official asked me whether my name was Akshay,” said Arjun when he reported to us the day after. “I say, no, that is not my name.”
Why did MOM think he might be Akshay? Because on the IPA was a FIN number: M****598P. Almost surely, the MOM officer would have looked it up on their system; the number must have been matched to someone by that name. Yet, the IPA document Arjun had in hand didn’t have that name on it; it had Arjun’s name. And Arjun’s passport number.
What we don’t know is whether Akshay was in Singapore. If he was, neither do we know what work pass he was on.
“MOM then called the company, but the company said they don’t know me,” continued Arjun. “The company said they did not apply for this IPA.”
Now, it might be the easy for a company to deny involvement, but what happened next (as reported by Arjun) suggests that the company was truly surprised to hear about this. They asked to see the supposed IPA that had their name on it. They seemed concerned that their name was being used for illegitimate purposes.
TWC2 has seen such cases before, where the supposed employers knew nothing about IPAs bearing their names.
A bit of detective work
We ourselves had a chance to look at Arjun’s IPA when he showed up at our office. Immediately, it didn’t look genuine. See the orange arrow on the image above? The alignment looked like a bad paste job. We also used MOM’s “Check a Work Pass” online page to ascertain if the IPA was a valid one. What we found was more than interesting.
- When we keyed in Arjun’s date of birth and the FIN number M****598P, the system responded with “No record found“. This meant that no IPA or Work Pass was in the system matching those two details in combination.
- When we keyed in Arjun’s date of birth and his passport number, the system responded differently:
Our educated guess as to what happened was this:
- Someone with access to MOM’s IPA system applied for a Training Employment Pass for Arjun, using his real name, his passport number and date of birth.
- This application for a Training Employment Pass was approved and a proper IPA was issued. It would have borne a unique FIN number – which neither Arjun nor TWC2 has yet seen.
- On the day that Arjun flew into Singapore (13 March 2025), that genuine IPA was live. That would be the most likely explanation why Arjun passed through Immigration with his passport with no trouble.
- Eight days later, that IPA was cancelled, and then it became impossible to convert it into a Training Employment Pass. Arjun was left high and dry.
The above leaves many more questions unanswered. These include:
- If there was a genuine IPA in Arjun’s name, why wasn’t the genuine document handed to him?
- Why was he given a cut-and-paste job bearing the FIN number of another person, probably named Akshay?
- Why was the genuine IPA cancelled after he arrived in Singapore?
The whole thing suggests that someone authorised to use the a company’s credentials to apply for IPAs might have been doing so for job vacancies that the company didn’t have, possibly to make money on the side by collecting recruitment fees. Arjun, for example, paid about $3,800 for a three-month job that he thought would have earned him $9,000 in total.
Stop issuing PDF In-principle Approvals
As we have argued in the post “Several cases of forgery of crucial MOM document“, MOM should immediately stop issuing IPAs in PDF document form. It’s too easy for crooks to make forgeries. Prospective foreign workers aren’t familiar enough with what a genuine IPA should look like to be able to detect fakes. We suggested that Approvals should be entirely accessible online, and prospective workers be issued with just a QR code to access the details of the approval carried on MOM’s own system.
TWC2 helped Arjun regularise his immigration status and offered continuing advice each step of the way so that he would not inadvertently find himself in a new problem.
We put him in our emergency shelter. He had nowhere to stay, and no money.
We put him on our food programme and supported him with various other expenses.
He had already reported the false document matter to MOM before he came to us, and we helped him follow up. TWC2 hopes that MOM will take this seriously and open an investigation. If MOM requires Arjun to stay on in Singapore for the purposes of the investigation, we expect MOM to offer him a job.
We do realise however that even if the IPA were entirely online, it mght not have helped Arjun, because in this particular case, there really was a genuine IPA in MOM’s system until it was cancelled. He would still have been misled that there was a 3-month Pass waiting for him.
If MOM had a practice of enquiring why an approved IPA is later cancelled, they might be able to flag up instances that looked like abuse of process.
However, there is another weakness in MOM’s system that allows such scams to multiply and which might have prevented situations like this where someone is victimised: MOM does not seem to check whether the Training Employment Pass being applied for is relevant to the managerial or professional level the scheme was intended to serve. Agents and employers are now latching on to this route for getting foreign workers for any number of low-skill positions, quota-free.
Readers might ask: How can it be efficient for employers to hire migrant workers on three-month passes? Wouldn’t it entail an endless cycle of training new workers? Indeed, that might be a downside of exploiting the Training Employment Pass route. But when a company has insufficient quota for Work Permits, yet need workers desperately, there is little choice. In any case, these being low-skill positions, there’s not a lot of training involved.
But above all, think of it this way: By using the Training Employment Pass route, agents and quite possibly complicit bosses and managers would be able to profit handsomely every three months from the recruitment fee paid by every new worker coming in.
In parallel with this case, many other cases involving Training Employment Passes have come to light, and MOM has told the media that they are investigating. We hope stern action will be taken.
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