In a series of bad publicity, Singapore Post (SingPost) has again added a new complaint from a consumer for its horrible service.
On 1 February, a local business owner named Daniel Goh lambasted SingPost for delivering a letter from a Government authority four months after the letter was assumed posted. Venting his complaint on his Facebook page, the businessman said that he is “readying his lawyers” as his business could be in trouble because of the mailing company’s “negligence”.
Goh, who runs The Good Beer Company and Smith Street Taps, explained that the Singapore Police Force’s (SPF) Licencing Unit wrote to him on 6 September 2018, requesting him to renew his stall’s alcohol license by 4 December 2018.
Shockingly, SingPost took four months to deliver the crucial letter to Goh. The postmark on the envelope clearly shows the letter was only cleared for delivery on 30 January 2019 – almost a month after Goh was supposed to renew the stall’s alcohol license. He mentioned that he received the letter only on 31 January.
“We needed to have paid for this before 4 December 2018 – it’s 1 February 2019 today. This essentially means we have been selling alcohol illegally for the past month without even knowing. We could be shut down any time if the police come checking,” he lamented.
Goh added that he may not be allowed to operate and sell beer in Singapore ever again due to SingPost “incompetence and sheer negligence” for delivering a long-overdue letter to him.
As such, Goh wrote that he is “readying the lawyers” on this incident.
Thankfully, four days after receiving the letter, his licence were renewed on the spot at the Licencing Department after a short interview.
Revealing this in a separate post, he thanked SPF for being “splendidly efficient yet thorough”.
On a separate incident, after his initial post was uploaded, The Independent Singapore (TISG) covered the story and wrote a headline titled “Local business owner plans on taking legal action against SingPost for taking 4 months to deliver Govt letter and jeopardised his business.”
However, this headline didn’t go too well with the business owner as he he did not in any way said that he intend to sue SingPost. All he did was to seek legal advice to protect his business.
He wrote, “Kindly change your story before I sic them on you instead, The Independent Singapore.”
Responding to this, TISG then changed its misleading headline to “Local business owner consults lawyers after SingPost took 4 months to deliver Govt letter to him and jeopardised his business“, which Goh still thinks is not ideal, but at least it now it doesn’t sound like he’s “marching a law firm to SingPost HQ”.
Earlier, SingPost was imposed a financial penalty of S$100,000 by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) for its failure to meet the delivery standards of local basic letters and registered mail on nine events in 2017.
In response to IMDA’s decision, SingPost’s Group Chief Executive Officer Paul Coutts said in a statement: “We deeply apologise to our customers for our service failures. We have heard their complaints and feedback; we feel their frustrations and seek to win back their trust.”
