On April 18, 2019, Facebook user Ruzaidie Dar Surnik had a rather unpleasant surprise when he found out that five foreign workers were registered under his residential address.

This proved to be quite the shock as he was not housing a single foreign worker, let alone five.

He had initially only checked after his friend asked him to make sure there weren't any false registration under his address.

He had it checked out on the Foreign Worker Tenant Enquiry System (FWTES), a system introduced in December 2018 by the Ministry of Manpower (MOM).

What is FWTES?

FWTES is an online system that allows private homeowners who have rented out their residential properties to check the names of work pass holders registered to be residing at their addresses.

It is currently in its soft-launch phase, and will be fully rolled out by end 2019.

Prior to the launch of FWTES, homeowners had to manually submit a hard copy form to MOM to perform the same functions.

After finding out about the false registrations, Ruzaidie promptly took to Facebook to share the news, imploring others to check to make sure there weren't any such cases for their own houses.

Here is his full post.

Other reported cases

Turns out his situation is not exactly unique.

In a statement on FWTES, MOM revealed some numbers regarding the amount of misused addresses.

In the last three years, more than 2,000 employers and 1,000 foreign workers have been taken to task for providing false addresses or for failing to update the latest addresses of their foreign workers.

Since FWTES was introduced, 489 homeowners have managed to report the misuse of their addresses.

This is a whopping increase from around 30 reports a month before the launch of FWTES.

A nifty little feature of the finished product will be the ability to delist your residential address from being used to register foreign workers.

Why do people do it?

MOM has fined 19 employers for failing to exercise supervision over their workers' place of residence and providing false information to MOM. Investigations are currently ongoing for other reported cases.

MOM also provided a few reasons why these things might occur.

A minority of cases were due to the employer making genuine administrative errors while registering the addresses, such as keying the wrong unit number.

In other cases, the employers had deliberately entered false address information to circumvent the housing requirement.

This was likely due to them housing their workers in overcrowded units or in unapproved factory premises. There were also cases where workers who sourced for their own accommodation deliberately provided false address information to their employers, as they were residing in overcrowded units.

So it is actually beneficial for all parties involved if all these misused addresses were, well, addressed.

Click here to see if you're affected.

Here's a helpful little step-by-step guide by MOM on how to use the online system.

Great.

Image from Google Maps and Ruzaidi