SkillsFuture is a national programme that provides Singaporeans with the opportunity to upgrade their skills at any stage of their lives.
While it aims to benefit job-seekers and mid-career workers, some others have found ways to financially exploit it.
A husband and wife duo, who submitted fake course fee grant applications and pocketed $39.9 million from them, were eventually caught by the authorities.
Facing charges for cheating, forgery, and money laundering among others, the court sentenced them to a total of 31 years in jail.
According to The Straits Times (ST), Ng Cheng Kwee and his wife, Lee Lai Leng, leveraged on the subsidies SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG) provided to businesses that send employees for skills training courses.
In order to maximise their earnings, they reportedly established 9 shell companies between January and July 2017. The firms then submitted 8,386 fraudulent course fee grant applications and a corresponding 8,391 claims to SSG.
In total, 25,141 fictitious employees working for 6 of these entities attended training courses conducted by the other 3 entities.
The SSG disbursed more than S$39.9 million of training grants to them from Aug to Oct 2017.
When the SSG flagged some of the applications and claims for manual checks, the pair would forge false documents to accede to them.
These included employment contracts and attendance records of training courses that never happened.
They later allegedly encashed money from the corporate accounts of these 9 firms in Aug 2017, noted ST.
Some of the money reportedly went towards purchasing 11kg of gold. They kept the rest in a safe in Lee’s brother’s flat.
Police eventually tracked the couple down and arrested Lee in Nov 2017. Ng’s arrest came a month later after he returned from China.
The court sentenced Ng to more than 17 years in jail, while his wife Lee received a 14-year sentence on Monday (16 Aug).
SkillsFuture is a great initiative that helps many people master the necessary skills to keep up with the ever-changing job landscape.
It’s extremely disheartening to learn that some of the money meant for it had ended up in devious hands. However, we’re glad that the scam was ultimately unravelled and promptly squashed.
We hope that the authorities can keep a stringent roster of legitimate companies and training institutions so that this won’t happen again.
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Featured image adapted from Iona Han on Unsplash.
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