Tag: work in Maldives

Immigration Department dismisses reports of expat system “flaw”, won’t rule out abuse by employers

Immigration officials have dismissed reports of a “flaw” in the country’s online expatriate registration system despite expressing concerns the system may be open to abuse by registered companies.

A department spokesperson confirmed this week that although new online registration introduced to try and streamline providing work visas to foreigners was not itself flawed, the system was nonetheless open to abuse from employers who allowed others to access their password-protected accounts.

The Department of Immigration and Emigration has also confirmed it has faced challenges in verifying whether construction projects were real or a front to smuggle foreign labour into the country, but told Minivan News it expects to resolve the issue from next month.

The comments were made after local newspaper Haveeru last week reported that a “serious issue” had been identified within the expatriate registration system installed by the National Centre for Information Technology (NCIT) that had allowed a steep rise in the number of foreign workers coming to the Maldives in May 2013.

Citing an anonymous immigration source, the paper reported that 4,000 expatriate workers had entered the country last month due to certain recruitment agencies abusing a “critical flaw” in the system.  According to the report, the flaw allowed recruiters to obtain an extra quota of foreign workers in order to profit from their transfer into the Maldives.

The NCIT, which was charged with installing the component of the monitoring system, this week rejected suggestions that such a flaw existed in the program in a joint statement (Dhivehi) issued with the Department of Immigration and Emigration.

The expatriate quota system had been assigned through procedures set out by the Immigration Department to the NCIT, the statement read.

Once a quota is obtained, the NCIT stated that an expatriate would only be granted entry into the country upon providing a photograph, their passport bio page and other official documents required by immigration officials that are required to be entered into the system.

“Therefore, we can confirm that 4000 expatriates have not entered the country unknown,” the statement added.

The NCIT’s dismissal of the media report’s comes as the Maldives faces increasing pressure to tackle the issue of unregistered expatriates, with the country appearing on the US State Department’s Tier Two Watch List for Human Trafficking.  The country has appeared on the list for three years in a row.

Employer responsibility

Although claiming no technical flaw had been found by authorities within the expat system, immigration spokesperson Ibrahim Ashraf told Minivan News that registered employers had a responsibility to prevent abuse of their company accounts.

Ashraf said all companies employing foreigners had to be registered on the expatriate registration system through official documents like a business registration certificate and a valid national ID.

If approved, he said the employer was then assigned through the online account a maximum quota of foreign workers depending on the size of their business or the specific project they were working on.  These accounts are protected with a password.

Ashraf said there were suspicions in the Immigration Department that some employers may have provided access to their unique account to employees, who were in turn bringing in foreign workers under the company’s name – and while personally profiting from trafficking them into the country.

He compared the practice to a member of the public giving their ATM bank card and pin number to another individual, then trusting them not to draw money out from their account.

“People that are being trusted to use [the expat online system] may be doing wrong. I think this is what has been happening. Management maybe putting too much trust in other people to use this system,” Ashraf claimed.

“Systematic abuse”

Immigration Controller Dr Mohamed Ali has previously told Minivan News that while almost all foreign workers coming to the Maldives arrive under registered companies, some were finding themselves “illegally used” by employers due to “systematic abuse” of the visa system.

Foreign low-wage workers are often lured to the country by agents after paying a ‘recruitment’ fee or entering into debt – sometimes as high as several thousand dollars – that is shared between local agents and recruiters in the country of origin, most significantly Bangladesh.

In many cases the workers are then brought into the country ‘legitimately’ by a specially-created paper company, created using the ID of a complicit or unwitting Maldivian national, for the stated purpose of working on a ‘construction project’ of dubious existence.

Senior immigration sources confided to Minivan News in April this year that almost no human verification was undertaken by authorities to ensure workers were genuinely employed once a business or construction project was approved.

Ashraf this week confirmed that there had been “issues” in inspecting construction sites across both the country’s inhabited and resort islands due to a shortage of staff.

However, he claimed that by July 31, 2013, the Immigration Department was to begin inspecting construction and other projects requiring foreign labour with the assistance of local councils and key industry associations.

These groups are expected to include the Maldives Association of Tourism Industry (MATI) and the Maldives Association of Construction Industry (MACI), according to the Immigration Department.

Ashraf added that the government had recently approved the hiring of an additional 30 staff for the department in order to help oversee what is expected to be a comprehensive audit of the visa system.  Officials would then move to penalise any abuse of the system by local employers.

Unregistered workforce

The exact scale of the Maldives’ unregistered foreign workforce remains unknown, with estimates ranging from between around 40,000 people to potentially double that amount.

Earlier this year, former MACI President Mohamed Ali Janah said an estimated 40 percent of the foreign employees in the construction sector were thought not to be legally registered.

Considering these numbers, Janah said at the time that he could not rule out the involvement of organised crime in certain employment agencies, which supply a large amount of foreign labour to building sites in the Maldives.

Janah claimed that 95 percent of construction groups operating in the country were Maldivian owned. However, as the country’s second largest industry on a GDP basis, the vast majority of employees in the sector were migrant workers, he said.

“We employ a huge workforce of some 60,000 to 70,000 people,” he explained at the time. “Of these people, sadly we have 40,000 to 50,000 who are expatriates.

By April of this year, Immigration Controller Dr Mohamed Ali confirmed that authorities had targeted the return of 10,000 unregistered workers by the end of the 2013.

The pledge to return a predetermined number of expatriates was criticised at the time by the Human Rights Commission of Maldives (HRCM), which raised concerns that some workers were potentially being punished for the actions of employers or agents acting outside the law.

While the government earlier this year launched a special campaign intended to raising awareness of the rights of foreign workers, NGOs and independent institutions continue to identify human trafficking as a significant issue needing to be addressed in the country.

Human rights groups in the Maldives have for instance continued to criticise both the present and former governments for failing to pass legislation that would allow authorities to press charges against individuals directly for the offence of human trafficking.  The legal measures to do so are presently under review in parliament.

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Low salaries and safety issues keeping foreign doctors away: Health Ministry

The Ministry of Health has identified salaries and staff safety as the key issues driving “shortages” in the number of trained medical staff coming from abroad to work at hospitals in the Maldives.

Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Health Geela Ali said that authorities were in the process of trying to recruit a number of medical specialists from across the region, adding that efforts were needed to overcome the various “issues” limiting interest from foreign professionals in coming to the Maldives.

The comments were made as Dr Mohamed Habeeb, presently in charge of Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital (IGMH) in Male’, last week raised concerns in local media about a serious shortage of doctors, which he said was having a major impact on services.

IGMH Media Correspondent Zeenath Ali explained to Minivan News today that although paediatric services had been suspended temporarily at IGMH three months ago due to a lack of qualified staff, the services were now operating as normal.

“Previously, we had an issue with the numbers of doctors due to some resignations and contracts finishing,” she said of the difficulties faced three months ago.

Zeenath added that while the issue of having no paediatric staff had since been resolved, IGMH has requested assistance from the Health Ministry in recruiting additional medical specialists to meet patient demand in the capital.

Despite this high demand for medical services, she said IGMH had not since been forced to terminate entire services at the hospital as a result of staff numbers.

“We have four paediatricians presently working at the hospital. But it remains difficult on the international market to try and attract paediatricians to join us,” she said.

According to Zeenath, IGMH has also requested that additional anaesthesiologists be hired to meet the hospital’s present workload. She added that the Ministry of Health was said to be working on recruiting more staff to cope with patient demand.

Speaking about these recruitment efforts, Health Ministry Permanent Secretary Geela said there was presently a shortage of medical staff at hospitals and health centres across the country as a result of ongoing issues – not least in the basic salary packages offered by the state.

“We have been running adverts to try and find qualified staff across the region, but so far we are not seeing adequate response from other countries,” she said.

Geela claimed that salary was among the most prevalent issues authorities had identified as being responsible for shortages in medical staff, with the government pledging to raise wages from January 2014 should the proposals gain parliamentary approval.

“This will allow us to offer better salaries from 2014 and we hope there will be more interest internationally,” she said.

Staff safety

Another challenge for attracting foreign medical staff was ensuring the safety of staff, particularly in the outer atolls.

Geela said that the Health Ministry could not alone ensure safer working environments for foreign medical staff, with wider support from the government and public needed.

“We need a societal approach to try and combat this problem. When we place staff on islands, community support is required to make sure they are looked after,” she said.

Threats

IGMH’s orthopaedic department temporarily ceased working last month after a group of people allegedly threatened a member of staff who had refused to provide a doctor’s note for overseas treatment through the Maldives’ nationwide health insurance scheme, ‘Aasandha’.

A patient, who asked for the doctor’s recommendation to receive medical treatment abroad, was first told by IGMH that such a recommendation could not be made because his injury could be treated in the hospital, according to a statement issued by IGMH.

The hospital claimed the man then refused treatment from IGMH before coming back to the hospital with a group of 10 men who threatened to attack the doctor, stating that he too would have to seek medical treatment through ‘Aasandha’ if he did not write the recommendation note.

The hospital at the time said it was considering the use of police officers maintain security on site following concerns about threats of violence to staff.

Minivan News reported in September 2012 on the alleged widespread intimidation, fraud and “substandard” treatment by patients, health authorities, local staff and the country’s courts faced by expatriate medical professionals in the Maldives.

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