More local homeowners are shocked to find that unknown foreigners have registered their home addresses as their residential address with the Ministry of Manpower (MOM).

Facebook user Klein Yeoman wrote that MOM officers visited him a few weeks ago asking if any foreign workers were staying at his house. Klein said that no workers were living with him when the MOM officers gave him a list that showed two unknown migrant workers had listed his home as their place of stay.

Revealing that he was shocked by this discovery, Klein wrote on social media: “2 weeks ago, some officers from Ministry of Manpower came knocking at my door asking if there are any FWs staying in my house!

“I said No but they show me a list where I found two foreigners actually registered their “place of stay” using my home address!!! I was shocked.

“The officers said they found a number of houses along my neighborhood were used by employers to register their FWs too. They then asked me to go online and deregister the FWs.”

Another Facebook user George Wong wrote that he also recently found that his home was used as a registered address by a foreign worker since January 2020 when MOM officers paid a visit to him.

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Revealing that he has to use his Singpass credentials to deregister the workers, George asked MOM why his Singpass credentials were not required when the worker registered his home as his place of stay in the first place. MOM’s Facebook admin asked George to fill out a feedback form.

This is not a new issue. In May last year, MOM reported that nearly 500 residences belonging to locals were falsely registered as foreign workers’ home addresses in the first five months of that year, compared to less than 30 such cases per year in the past.

MOM revealed then that it “contacted each of these home owners to rectify their residential records and block their addresses to prevent further misuse,” MOM said that it revoked the work permits of 13 workers and has fined 19 employers in relation to the cases.

The employers were penalised for “failing to exercise supervision over their foreign workers’ place of residence and for providing false address information” while the workers were banned from working in Singapore for abetting their employers.

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MOM further revealed that these employers had purposefully registered false addresses for their foreign employees to circumvent housing regulations while housing their workers in unapproved factory premises or overcrowded rooms.

Some workers had themselves provided false addresses to their employers since they were living in overcrowded units they had sourced for themselves. A small number of cases were due to “genuine administrative errors” such as employers plugging in the wrong unit number as they registered addresses.

MOM has also taken over 2,000 employers and 1,000 foreign workers to task between 2016-2019  for providing false addresses or for failing to update the addresses of their workers.

Nearly 500 residences belonging to locals falsely registered as foreign workers’ home addresses

Local homeowner shocked to find five unknown foreigners have listed his home as their residential address