Stronger deterrence needed to deal with bogus claims on public grants

THE amount in the scam was an eye-popping amount - nearly S$40 million, to be exact. That was how much a criminal syndicate was alleged to have cheated the SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG) statutory board, having made bogus SkillsFuture Credit claims that went undetected for months.

It's easily the largest known case of defrauding a public institution to date, and it's mind-boggling how the perpetrators managed to pull off such an elaborate ruse with seemingly relative ease.

After all, the maximum amount of SkillsFuture Credit that a single person can claim to offset the cost of his or her training courses is S$500, which means that the syndicate - which used a network of nine business entities to make the fraudulent claims - would have submitted the names of some 80,000 individuals in order to make off with S$40 million.