The first group of five workers explain their predicament to TWC2’s case officer
On Monday, 16 June 2025, five Bangladeshi workers came to TWC2 with an unusual problem. It was so unusual, it took us several minutes before we even understood the contours of it. In the course of the week, more workers came to our office with similar problems, and by Friday, there were 19 men on our case files.
Smooth sailing, until MOM refuses to issue Work Permits
What did the men tell us?
None of the workers knew each other before the issue cropped up. They had each applied for their jobs through a Bengali-speaking agent. Different workers used different agents; it wasn’t as if they all used the same agent. Mostly, their agents were based in Dhaka, but given the nature of internet communication, it was possible that some agents might have been operating out of Singapore, at least part of the time.
Nor were the 19 men placed in the same company; they were placed by their various agents in ten different companies, albeit all construction.
Straight away, we’re thinking: If at all there is a culprit behind this problem, it’s not likely to be a single culprit – which is interesting, to say the least.
At the point of seeking work through their respective agents, each man submitted his passport to his agent, who made a scan of it.
Below is a representation of the key details shown on Bangladeshi passports. We cannot image the men’s real passports in this article because they contain personal details. The illustrations below represent two men’s passports.
When the agents succeeded in finding jobs, the agents forwarded to each of their respective clients (the prospective workers) a copy of an MOM-issued document known as “In-Principle Approval for a Work Permit” (IPA). This IPA document would have been generated by MOM based on the details provided in the online application made by the employer or the employer’s authorised (and Singapore-licensed) agent. We can assume that the employer (or his authorised agent) would have used details from the scan of the worker’s passport.
The illustrations below indicate what details were shown for the two workers in our examples (all names changed).
As in virtually all cases, the workers would have had to pay their agents once the IPAs were handed to them. The amounts varied from one man to another, but they were mostly in the range of $3,000 to $5,000.
If you compare the workers’ names in the first pair of illustrations (representing their passports) and the second pair (their IPAs) you will notice that the names are somewhat different. The IPAs have longer names, basically lengthened by appending their fathers’ names to their personal names. Many of the 19 workers who came to TWC2 noticed this discrepancy but didn’t think much of it as it is quite customary in Muslim societies to use a combination of personal and fathers’ names. Variable name formats are not red flags.
Closer to the departure dates of their flights to Singapore, most of our 19 workers received another version of their IPAs, represented by the illustrations below, though at least one man received the second version of his IPA after arriving in Singapore from someone in the company. In this second version, the name corresponds exactly with the name in the passport. All the other details – date of birth, passport number, employer name, including salary details – remained identical between the first and second versions of the IPA. None of the workers saw any reason to be suspicious.
No man faced any difficulty coming in through Immigration at Changi Airport. Immigration would naturally have checked that the incoming person had a valid IPA inside the Ministry of Manpower’s system, otherwise they would not have been let into the country.
Each man was then sent to MOM’s Onboarding centre for a few days for post-arrival orientation. At check-in, some men showed the Onboarding centre their IPAs with their short names (same as passport), other men presented their IPAs that contained longer names (not same as passport). None had any difficulty being admitted into the Onboarding centre.
All the men went to work right after finishing the Onboarding process. The employers were expecting them.
A few weeks after starting work, the men were sent to the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) to convert their IPAs into Work Permits. The men had to bring their passports with them, and it was at this point that they had their first indication that something was terribly wrong. The officer at MOM noticed that the names on the passports the workers were presenting (examples A1, A2) were different from the names on the IPAs issued by MOM and seen on MOM’s computer system (examples B1, B2). The men’s passports had shorter names, whereas the IPAs had longer names (father’s name included).
Given such a discrepancy, MOM could not issue Work Permits. Some of the men were directed to the Bangladeshi embassy to obtain confirmation that their passports were genuine. The embassy confirmed that they were (a relief) but also gave them copies of scans that – we believe – had been submitted to MOM at the beginning of the IPA application process…. by whoever. See illustrations below.
Not all our 19 men recounted exactly the same sequence of events. The sequence described above represents the general case.
We also made three observations from among the cases that we saw: Firstly, none of the men were new workers; all had worked in Singapore before. Secondly, these were renewed passports, with different passport numbers from their previous passports. Thirdly, they had renewed their passports after their return to Bangladesh from their recent previous jobs in Singapore, and so had not used these newer passports before. These details may or may not be relevant.
Which is real, which is not?
After close scrutiny of their passports, scans of passports and copies of IPAs, TWC2’s opinion is that
– the passports the men had in hand (examples A1, A2) were genuine;
– the scans of passports submitted to MOM (examples D1, D2) had been altered.
As for the two versions of their IPAs, our opinion is that
– the IPAs with longer names (examples B1, B2) were genuinely issued by MOM even though they were based on false scans of passports;
– the IPAs with shorter names (examples C1, C2) were forged, even though the names there corresponded exactly with the genuine passports.
What a mess!
At this juncture, we at TWC2 are unable to explain how or why this mess came about. Nor is it clear which party is the culprit, except that the workers were obviously not party to whatever scheme had been hatched. They were utterly shocked when MOM pointed out the discrepancy to them, and distressed that they would lose their jobs for which they had paid thousands of dollars to agents.
There is a possibility that whoever was behind this – and there may be several people involved – was not doing it out of ill intention. Maybe they were trying, misguidedly, to fit Muslim name customs into westernised bureaucratic pigeonholes of “Surname”, “Given name” and “Name”. That being said, it is extremely perplexing why anyone would go as far as creating modified versions of official documents.
Yet, the latest information we’re getting is that the employers of a few men are offering their workers thousands of dollars to go home as soon as possible. Hearing this, we can’t help but wonder: if one is not a party to the subterfuge, why would one offer so much money?
Quick to repatriate
The men were upset to hear from their employers that, since MOM would not be issuing them with Work Permits, they would be repatriated in short order. A few of the workers told us that that position was echoed by the MOM officers they had spoken to.
Such a response did not feel right. Whether or not there was any malice behind all this, the workers were nonetheless victims. They had paid money for these jobs and now they’re told that they had to go home because their papers were not in order. What about the moral obligation to do right by the victim? We were perplexed why the frontline MOM officers’ response seemed more about closing the matter than looking deeper into how and why this was happening.
We wrote to MOM immediately requesting that they hold the men back and conduct a full investigation. We were happy to get a positive response and the men were put on Special Passes, which regularised their continued stay in Singapore while an inquiry proceeded. We think it should be easy to find that the men had no part in all of this, and once that is established – even if the investigation has not yet gotten to the root of the mystery – they should be either put on the Temporary Job Scheme or given the green light to look for new jobs.
We shall see. This is a developing story. We’re always concerned that the wheels of bureaucracy grind very slowly and workers are often left in the lurch for months and months with no income. We hope this does not become another example of that.
Clan “Double_passport_2025”