On 25 April (Thursday), TOC published a story about a netizen named Ruzaidie Dar Surnik who found out that five strangers, all foreigners, have used his residential address and registered it with the Ministry of Manpower (MOM).
He said to TOC that he has brought up this issue to MOM in which they responded and noted that they “will be conducting investigations against the parties involved for possible false declaration offences”.
They also added that MOM will tag his address so it would be not be able to be used for the registration of foreign workers.
Besides that, the Singaporean also got in touch with the respective companies of these foreigners to inform them of this problem, in which two of them got back to him and said they will investigate this matter with the affected foreign workers.
As such, Mr Ruzaidie urged everyone to check MOM’s website and inform them if they experience similar situation like his.
After our article was published, many other residents have come forward and exposed that have also encountered the same situation after checking on MOM’s website. All these netizens revealed this news on our Facebook page.
Some expressed their dissatisfaction towards MOM for allowing such a thing to happen. They said that MOM should act on this problem fast before it affects more citizens, causing them to be more angry at the Government. Adding to that, an online user named Gugu Tan also suggested that MOM should “send mail out to resident for update as default or SMS to owner for update”.
William Choo questioned if MOM auto-issues Work Permit, S Pass and Employment Pass without going through important information like foreign workers’ passport number, address and certificates. He also highlighted that MOM should do proper due diligence before issuing any permits, and not rely on residents to tell them if their address has been abused by these foreigners.
Besides that, he also suggested that MOM should ask “HDB for access to the database of flats approved for subletting & check WP/SP/EP applicants’ addresses against the data”. Therefore, if they do find any fake addresses, then they should be blacklisted from submitting another application for 6 months.
