Foreign employment agencies that have not submitted details of their businesses to the government are likely to start facing action from next week. The Department of Foreign Employment (DoFE), on Friday, directed the agencies to comply with its instruction within a week or face legal action.

This means that if agencies do not furnish information on the number of workers supplied to respective countries, fees collected from outbound workers, branch offices and authorised agents, among others, they will be slapped with a fine of Rs 50,000 as per the provision in the Foreign Employment Act 2007.

DoFE has been compiling these information to present it to the International Relations and Labour Committee of the Legislature-Parliament for investigation.

Despite repeated calls, only around 500 out of 751 agencies operating in the country have submitted the details sought by DoFE.

With the number of fraud cases in the foreign employment sector growing, the committee, on November 18 last year, had decided to look into the case of each foreign employment agency and had asked DoFE to provide the details within 35 days. However, DoFE is yet to collect all the information as many agencies are reluctant to reveal their details.

On November 9, the committee had asked DoFE to provide relevant information like names of the proprietors of the recruiting agencies, addresses, contact numbers, companies’ permanent account number (PAN) and receipts. Later, it sought more details citing information was insufficient to conduct a thorough investigation.

The details demanded by the committee include agencies’ employee list, documents of their permit renewal, bills and other information related to the last three fiscal years’ financial transactions with individuals and companies.

Badri Karki, spokesperson for DoFE, said that ‘majority of agencies’ have submitted the details. “Action will be taken against those that fail to comply with the given direction as per the Foreign Employment Act,” he said.

As per Clause 54 of the Act, DoFE may first issue a warning to any licensee that fails to follow the instructions, slap a fine of Rs 50,000 for the second instance and another Rs 100,000 along with revocation of licence, for the third instance.

As of December 23 (extended deadline), only 300 plus companies had submitted their details.

A DoFE official said that they have been providing extra time to errant agencies as per the legal provision. A majority of the companies had not submitted the details by the earlier deadlines and even the companies that had submitted the documents had lacked important information.

The Parliamentary Committee members said that they want to check the sector closely to find anomalies and suggest necessary reforms to the Ministry of Labour and Employment.

Published on: 18 January 2015 | The Himalayan Times