Agent said basic salary would be $1,550; on IPA it was $800

Boyuan (name changed) is a trained lifeguard from Jiangxi, China. He had just been fired, after only four months on the job, for what seemed like a trivial matter – not immediately responding to a phone call from his manager.

His main unhappiness was over the $1,090 he had to pay out of his own pocket for a training course. He was already a trained lifeguard in China, but the employer still directed him to go for a course in Singapore. This may well be a Singapore rule, and Boyuan was not taking issue with it per se. What he was unhappy about was that he had to write this off only a few months later when he was fired. Is there any way to claim the amount back?

We explained that such a claim wouldn’t be covered by employment law. It would have to be filed as a civil claim through the Small Claims Court. It wasn’t obvious that his would be a strong case.

At recruitment

With overtime pay added in, the Chinese agent said, he could expect to earn a total of about $2,300 to $2,700 a month. However, Boyuan was also informed that there was a maximum limit to how much overtime he could perform, and the maximum would be 72 hours a month. The agent’s grasp of this overtime cap indicates that he or she was familiar with Singapore law. Perhaps he or she had been fully briefed by the employer here.

However, on the IPA, Boyuan’s base salary was only $800 a month, with a $600 fixed allowance. The total was only $1,400. The much-lower base salary also meant that his overtime rate was far less than what a base salary of $1,550 would imply.

Unfortunately, we see such discrepancies in many workers’ documentation. It is a rampant problem, where employers and agents declare salary figures to MOM that are different from what had been agreed with the prospective workers. This is actually an offence of false declaration, but apparently it does not bother many people.

When he signed what he called his contract in China (it was with the agent) Boyuan assumed that it was the governing document for his employment. He knew nothing about IPAs and he certainly wasn’t expecting there to be another document. With everything agreed, he paid 25,000 yuan to the agent (about $4,700).

A flight ticket was bought for 29 October 2025. The day before his departure, the agent forwarded to him the IPA. He noticed that the salary details there were different from what he had agreed to. In his mind, however, the contract he signed remained the governing document; by contrast, his signature was nowhere on the IPA.

Because this was how he saw it – it was rational to see things as he did – Boyuan didn’t seem too concerned about the different numbers, so he went on to take the flight. However, there is the argument that even if there was a discrepancy between what had been agreed and what the employer (or their Singapore-licensed agent) had declared on the IPA, should the worker still board the plane to come to Singapore, he would in effect be “accepting” the revised terms of the contract. That said, for such an argument to hold, the worker must be aware that (a) contracts signed in China are generally not enforceable in Singapore and in their absence, (b) the terms of the IPA would constitute new (revised) terms of contract which would then be the governing terms of employment. It is doubtful that a young man who had never left China before would be aware of such legal niceties. How would he know that the act of boarding a flight would constitute acceptance of revised contract terms?

Beyond that, and using the IPA salary as reference, we managed to identify a few instances of short-payment of salary. However, we advised Boyuan that the amount did not add up to much, and once he filed a salary claim, he might remain stuck in Singapore for a while. He would have the right to look for a new job, but there wouldn’t be a lot of openings for lifeguards, making prospects poor.

All things considered, Boyuan thought it better to just go home.

Not good enough

A fair-minded person would feel uncomfortable with an ending like this. There was something suspicious happening at the recruitment stage, resulting in the agent, presumably acting on information provided by the employer about the job vacancy, misleading Boyuan about the salary he could expect – including having a contract document prepared and signed – while different details were declared to the Ministry of Manpower for the IPA. Giving Boyuan his copy of the IPA only one day before his flight left him little time to understand and resolve the salary discrepancy; his totally understandable unfamiliarity about the contractual implications of boarding the flight without first resolving the discrepancy might have been deliberately exploited for advantage.

What will it take to crack down on such duplicitous behaviour?

Rather than totally saying that contracts signed abroad are irrelevant because they are unenforceable in Singapore, MOM can still take the view that any false declaration for IPA application is a serious matter, tarnishing Singapore’s image. If any migrant worker can show that he had an agreement in his or her home country stating different terms of employment, and the IPA shows inferior terms, MOM should take this very seriously. It becomes, prima facie, evidence of false declaration by the employer and an investigation should be triggered.

Otherwise Singapore’s reputation for fair dealing and the rule of law will suffer.

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