TWO TOWN COUNCILS, TWO DIFFERENT RESPONSES

Someone asked why the CPIB was called in so quickly at Ang Mo Kio Town Council while no CPIB action was seen at WP-run AHTC despite all the accusations. What's the difference?

NOT A GOVT ACTION BUT AN ACTION TAKEN BY AMK TOWN COUNCIL...

First, this probe is not an action taken by the government against the town council. This is an action taken by the the AMK Town Council against their general manager in response to a complaint.

ZERO TOLERANCE FOR CORRUPTION

PAP Town Councils hold themselves to a higher standard of zero tolerance for corruption.

Ang Mo Kio Town Council received a complaint against Victor Wong in September.

Chairman of AMK TC, Ang Hin Kee said that the nature of the complaint "relates to probable behaviour needing investigation done by CPIB". Thus the town council referred the case to CPIB.

IN CONTRAST

Despite the lapses flagged by AGO, and despite the findings of KPMG, and KPMG suggesting the possibility of criminal breach of trust, WP has REFUSED TO ACKNOWLEDGE that there are serious issues with their town council.

Instead WP has chosen to politicize the problems at their town council, to play victim and to insist that there was no wrongdoing.

ACCOUNTABILITY TO RESIDENTS UNDER THE TOWN COUNCIL ACT

AMK TC has held themselves accountable to their residents by referring the case to CPIB for possible wrongdoing.

AHTC on the other hand had gone the opposite way to fight tooth and nail in court to obstruct every investigation into their affairs dragging the investigations from months to years and still with no conclusion in sight.

Grit, determination, courage and sacrifice

Once upon a time, a man rose to the occasion, brought a small country through its birth pangs, nourished and nurtured it and turned it into a nation strong and free.

Grit, determination, courage and sacrifice.

"I have a few million people's lives to account for. And Singapore will survive!" 

"Never fear!"

Does it make sense to pay for redundancy insurance to receive total payouts ≤ 2.4 months salary?

Under WP's proposal, payout is CAPPED at 40% of the prevailing MEDIAN salary.

Essentially this means getting a total payout (for 6 months) that is LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO 2.4 months of salary. (0.4 x 6 = 2.4)

WHAT IF YOU EARN MORE THAN MEDIAN SALARY?

You do not get 40% of your last drawn salary. Your payout will be 40% of the prevailing median salary.

This means for those earning more than the median salary, your total payout is less than 2.4 months of your last drawn salary.

It gets progressively smaller as salary gets bigger. Thus, if your salary is $10k a month at the time of your retrenchment, your total payout for 6 months will be less than one month of your last drawn salary.

ASK YOURSELF：

Why do you want to pay for redundancy insurance that gives you a total payout that is less than one month of your last drawn salary?

With a $10k per month salary, you have no problem saving one month of your salary on your own at no cost - that is, without paying for any insurance.

Similarly, why do you want to pay for a redundancy insurance that pays you 2 months of your salary in total or less than 2 months salary?

Pay for it or save for it?

Instead of paying from your salary for such a redundancy insurance, why not create your own private, personal 'redundancy saving account' and set aside money every month to save in this account? You can earn interest even.

If you never get retrenched, that money you save can be used for retirement, or for a holiday upon retirement.

Remember, after 6 months, if you still don't get a job, you're on your own. So why not save for rainy days?

Prudent to save for rainy days

In fact it is good discipline and good financial planning to save at least 6 months of your salary for rainy days. It is good to start young when your commitments are not so great and build it up gradually.

Low wage worker subsidizing high wage worker or vice versa?

One may argue for lower payouts for the high wage worker by saying that the high wage worker is helping to subsidize the redundancy benefit for the low wage worker.

In reality, most people retrenched are PMETs. In the third quarter of 2016, 73% of people made redundant were PMETs, higher than their workforce representation. Those with tertiary qualifications also form the bulk of the layoffs in the third quarter of 2016. (See here: http://bit.ly/2gVtOPF)

So in this risk pooling, the low income workers are actually subsidising retrenchment benefit for the high wage workers.

WE HAVE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT PROBLEM UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE IS MEANT TO SOLVE: Walter Theseira

SIM University economist Walter Theseira said there are already schemes to help those in need.

"If the problem is subsistence for low-income households, unemployment insurance isn't necessary because we have a framework of providing them cash assistance, although we can debate whether that assistance is enough.

"If it's giving people a buffer between jobs, is unemployment insurance the best way, or should we encourage people to set aside their own savings?" he said.

The Damning Report from KPMG: 4th Progress Report

For as long as anyone can remember, the accounts at Workers' Party-run town council has been in a mess. But now we discover that it is in fact in a much bigger mess that we thought based on the latest KPMG report.

AND YET, Pritam Singh is still NOW telling people that his town council will award the contract for a new Town Council Accounting System "shortly".

Can you imagine that?! They still have not put in place a credible accounting system!! They didn't get down to work after the special audit by AGO?

Where is their accountability and sense of responsibility? And honesty?

"PERVASIVE" was the word KPMG used to describe the lapses.

In addition to the 115 control failures identified by the special audit carried out by AGO, KPMG has identified another 70 control failures!

And KPMG concluded that unless its town councillors and senior management “set the right tone at the top”, and clearly define the standard of competence and accountability it expects from employees, the lapses could not be fully remedied.

It starts with the leadership at the top.

"Highly irregular" methods were used to process over $60 million worth of payments. 

 That's not a small amount.

AHTC also extensively used manual journal entries to record payments to third parties. There were over 48,500 such manual entries involving more than $60 million from 2011 to last year. This avoids records being entered into accounts payable, thus circumventing financial controls.

Temporary Clearing Accounts

There are 18 temporary clearing accounts used for more than one million transactions were not cleared swiftly. Why do they need so many temporary clearing accounts?

Dummy Vendor Code

Look, we are not dummies.

After the special audit by AGO that identified over 100 control failures, instead of introducing measures that eliminate those failures, AHTC introduced a dummy vendor code in 2015 that resulted in another control failure.

Should we say, "Well done, Workers' Party"?

The use of this dummy code meant duplicate or fictitious payments could be made without being detected.

In its conclusions, KPMG noted that that the town council’s lapses could not be fully remedied unless its town councillors and senior management “set the right tone at the top”, and clearly define the standard of competence and accountability it expects from employees.

“The Control Failures are pervasive, cutting across the key areas of governance, financial control, financial reporting, procurement and records management over the course of five years,” the audit firm said in its report.

 “We are of the view that there is an issue larger than the sum of individual lapses and that these Control Failures point to a failure in AHTC’s control environment.”

Can the leaders at the top set the right tone? That is a big question.

How much do you trust Sylvia Lim, the Chairman of Workers' Party and co-chairman of their town council?

Sylvia Lim has been caught lying - without batting an eyelid - more than once. She lied to voters. She lied to reporters. She lied in Parliament. She has been described as a liar by Justice Quentin Loh.

Did it bother her? No.

ASEM: a big idea from a small country

The 11th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) just concluded in Mongolia.

DO YOU KNOW that ASEM was MOOTED BY SINGAPORE? ASEM was a big idea from a small country and ESM Goh Chok Tong played a key role. Here's what he did.
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Excerpt of Goh Chok Tong's speech at the S Rajaratnam Lecture on 17 Oct 2014:

"When I took over from Mr Lee Kuan Yew in 1990, survival and security concerns had receded.

18. We had stable relations with our immediate neighbours – Malaysia and Indonesia. Within the region, our neighbourhood was secure. The ASEAN member states, then just six of us, had also developed cooperative relations with one another.

19. So we shifted our foreign policy attention to increasing Singapore’s geopolitical and international economic space.
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26. The genesis of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) is an example of this - the value of understanding and aligning interests.

27. In the early 1990s, China had just begun to open up, but it was still very much shrouded by a bamboo curtain. At the same time, East Asian economies were growing rapidly and there was much international interest in the region.

28. While the so-called tiger economies were known to the West, few countries had direct links to the Chinese leadership, or had acquired an understanding of developments in China.

29. In October 1994, the World Economic Forum (WEF) held its regional meeting in Singapore with the theme of Asia-Europe Cooperation. That inspired me to think about linking Asia with Europe. I believed that the Europeans would be interested in forging closer links with China, the awakened dragon, and other Asian economies; and certainly, Asia wanted more investments from Europe. Singapore was well-placed to play this role; we had established strong links with the Chinese leadership, and were well-regarded as a reliable interlocutor.

30. MFA’s concept paper which we circulated to prospective members explained the strategic rationale:

“Three major centres of economic power – North America, Europe and Asia – are likely to dominate global trade and investment activities well into the 21st Century. It is vital to ensure that there are well-established channels of communication between the three centres. North America is linked to Europe through the rich network of trans-Atlantic institutions. East Asia and North America are linked by APEC and other Pacific Basin Networks. What is palpably absent is a strong high-level Europe-Asia link. This missing link needs to be bridged.”

31. The timing of my official visit to France in October was fortuitous. The French were due to assume the European Union Presidency in January 1995.

32. In a restricted meeting with French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, I outlined the ASEM proposal. He saw the strategic benefits of the proposal and agreed to bring the EU members on board.

33. In turn, I was able to canvass ASEAN leaders’ support for this a month later, when APEC held its Summit in Bogor, Indonesia. So again it was good fortune. It was an APEC Summit, but I was also thinking of ASEM.

34. At the Summit, I first sought out Thai Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai. I explained the rationale for ASEM and then invited Thailand to host the first ASEM. He agreed. Why did Singapore not want to host it, when it came up with the idea? It’s because Thailand’s buy-in and active participation would remove any misperception that Singapore was proposing ASEM purely to boost its own international stature. After Chuan Leekpai, I briefed the other ASEAN leaders separately. They all welcomed the concept of ASEM.

35. ASEM was a big idea from a small country. We pulled it off because we did not think only of our own interests. We sold its strategic benefits to others, aligned their interests and ours, and secured their buy-in.

36. As the country which mooted ASEM, Singapore gained recognition for its strategic thinking and ability to deliver on an idea. But it would not have been possible had we not seen nor acted upon the confluence of interests between Asia and Europe.


https://www.mfa.gov.sg/content/mfa/media_centre/press_room/pr/2014/201410/press_20141017.html

Singapore is like a durian, says Lee Kuan Yew

Singaporeans love durians. But did you know that Mr Lee Kuan Yew once likened Singapore to the durian for its thorny outside and rich inside?

On Singapore being kicked out of Malaysia, Mr Lee Kuan Yew said in September 1965:

Some people think that just because we are a small place, they can put the screws on us. It is not so easy. We are a small place in size, and geography. But in the quality
of the men, the administration, the organisation, the mettle in a people, the fibre - therefore, don't try. That is why we got booted out.

If they could have just squeezed us like an orange and squeezed the juice out, I think the juice would have been squeezed out of us, and all the goodness would have been sucked away. But it was a bit harder, wasn't it? It was more like the durian.

You try and squeeze it, your hand gets hurt. And so they say, "Right, throw out the durian."

But inside the durian is a very useful ingredient, high protein. And
we will progress.

New PSLE Scoring System

This is how the PSLE scores will be calculated from 2021.

Primary 6 students sitting for the national exam in 2021 will not be receiving an aggregate “T-score”.

Instead, the marks they receive for each exam will fall into a range of eight bands, and the corresponding points added up, similar to the GCE ‘O’-Levels grading.

The best possible score is 4 points, and the worst is 32.

The current Primary One cohort will be the first to sit for exams under this new system.

Commenting on the changes, Acting Minister for Education (Schools) Ng Chee Meng said the new scoring system is intended to ease the pressure students face in competing against the performance of their peers.

And these are the placement outcomes under the new PSLE scoring system.

"Going forward, MOE will be engaging parents and students so that they better understand this new system and we will take the next few months to work with educators and schools to go through (the changes)," said Mr Ng.

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See also: https://www.facebook.com/SingaporeMatters/photos/a.710662802353449.1073741828.710654255687637/1037031986383194/?type=3&theater