Are some immigration officers too busy working on the wrong side of the law side earning incomes, that it has affected the efficiency of our Immigration Department?

For, not so long ago, Malaysians were able to boast to the world as we managed to get our digitally equipped passports done within a couple of hours at the many UTCs, some open even on weekends.

However, it was a shortlived joy, for now we hear how it may take six months to get a passport done, never mind the hours one has to queue up for a number which may not be there when it gets to your turn. 

The Immigration Department, in acknowledging a shortage of passports, said they expected the matter to be ironed out by January next year, a report in Today Online stated.

Why the slide down?

Questions making us wonder what is happening within the Immigration Department rush to the mind with the recent sacking of 15 Malaysian immigration officers with links to human trafficking groups for deliberately disabling passport controls at airports for years.

The 15 are said to be suspiciously linked to the syndicate was trafficking migrants to Geneva, Switzerland, which saw an arrest of 19 people including two Malaysian immigration officers.

Due to the sacking of the 15 people, the government has announced that it would appoint a new taskforce to probe the matter and has indicated an overhaul of the entire immigration system.

Penang Institute board member Steven Sim says this is where it gets more suspicious, as he reminds that a contact to overhaul the system was already signed last year sometime in November.

“From last year onwards, it looked as if massive new contracts were given out to a few closely-linked government contractors.

“These contracts totalled up to billions, and are mostly given without open tender despite the crisis facing our Immigration Department.

“Information about these contracts are not available in the public domain. Zahid Hamidi (Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, Deputy Prime Minister) had declared at least one of the deals as ‘official secret’ which cannot be given even to MPs who enquired in the Dewan Rakyat,” says Sim.

The Deputy Spokesperson of DAP Parliamentary Committee for Human Resources also through research complied information over the last few months on some of the major deals that is enough to indicate that there is a strong undercurrent taking place in the past one year in the DPM’s Immigration Department.

“Companies such as MyEG were given lucrative contracts despite bad track record, including being guilty of violating the Competition Act 2010 and worse, breaking immigration laws as confirmed by both the Immigration Department and the Auditor General by illegally allowing the renewal of almost 9,000 foreigners in 2013 and 2014 alone.

“Bestinet’s (one of the companies) service which was suspended in January 2015 and had quietly resumed first to industrial workers but since July 2016 it was expanded to domestic helpers.

“HeiTech Padu of course created and runs the now infamous MyIMMS system which was allegedly sabotaged over a period of six (6) years allowing untold number of illegal entries into Malaysia.

“Without a proper post-mortem, a new company Prestariang has been appointed to completely overhaul the MyIMMS.

“It was first announced to be an RM6 billion contract but was later on divided into smaller jobs; the first contract costing RM400 to RM500 million,” says Sim.

He also cites that within the first five months of 2016, Datasonic was given half a billion ringgit worth of contract, including to take over the printing of passport fully from government printer by the end of this year.

“Now that they have sacked the 15 immigration officers, the government wants to propose a new contract to overhaul the system, ‘pretending’ that they never signed any contract last year.

“Did the sacking of the 15 immigration officers serve as an endorsement to give way to more contracts awarded? We are talking about a RM6 billion contract,” he adds.

Despite all these, Sim says he suspects that the Home Ministry has been quietly but actively awarding new major contracts.

“We do not know how many more big amount contracts were given out by the Home Ministry,” says Sim.

Resource : The Heat Malaysia