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Written Answer by Mr Tan Chuan-Jin, Acting Minister for Manpower & Senior Minister of State, National Development, to Parliamentary Question on Emolument Criteria for S Pass Applicants

Er Dr Lee Bee Wah: To ask the Acting Minister for Manpower (a) why are bonuses and allowances not taken into account in determining whether an applicant qualifies for an S pass; and (b) whether the Ministry will review its policy to include bonuses and allowances as part of the emolument of an S pass applicant.

Mr Tan Chuan-Jin:

  1. For the S Pass and Employment Pass (EP), we use an applicant’s fixed monthly salary as one of the main criteria to determine their eligibility for a work pass. It is a proxy for the applicant’s quality and economic contribution to Singapore.
  2. As our work passes are valid for two to three years, it is important to assess an applicant’s eligibility based on factors that are consistent throughout the period of employment and can be reliably declared upfront when the work pass application is made.
  3. Therefore, only salary components that are paid regularly and do not vary on a monthly basis may be included in the fixed monthly salary. In practice, this means basic salary and fixed monthly allowances.
  4. We do not consider variable payments such as bonuses, variable allowances, or commissions in the fixed monthly salary. This is because some foreign employees would end up not earning those payments, due to their variable nature (e.g. due to poor performance in the case of bonuses). They may then fall below the minimum salary criteria to be eligible for their work pass and its accompanying privileges. Including variable payments will also make it easy for employers who want to game the system to declare a high performance-based salary, but pay much less on the grounds that the worker did not attain the performance targets. This undermines our work pass framework and may lead to foreign workers entering at much lower salaries than local workers.
  5. Companies can refer to http://www.mom.gov.sg for MOM’s rules on salary components that can be included as part of qualifying salaries for S Pass and EP applications.