Alleged

Last week, two government officers came to my office, demanding to see our business license. Not knowing exactly what they wanted, even after showing them certain documents, they went to the next door shop, took the sample for us to see. It was the blue background with a picture of the business owner kind of license. Something which I have never seen in my office in all my 9+ years of working in this company.

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As far as my immediate boss and I are concerned, all we needed was a developer's license and the Advertising & Permit for the houses (currently under construction) that we are selling.

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According to the officers, we renewed the said license every year except last year. Puzzled by it, I asked the HR dept to contact our resident engineer (RE), who happened to be on a one year leave last year. I thought that perhaps with his absence, the business license wasn't renewed.

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Our RE told the HR dept that I (yes, yours truly) have the said license and that it was kept in my safe. I was shocked.

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We couldn't produce the license and were issued two summonses.

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The next day, the RE came to see me concerning this matter and once again, I explained that I have no clue whatsoever about this license. I specifically told him NOT to mention my name again, where this license is concerned.

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I received a phone call from my big boss in the afternoon saying that MY name was mentioned concerning this license. I immediately told her that I knew who that "snitch" was and that I really had no clue concerning it.

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I called my tax consultant as well as our group secretarial and was informed that as a Pte Ltd company, all we needed was to have a copy of the Certificate of Incorporation to operate our day to day business.

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I was by then, pretty mad at the RE for accusing me of keeping something which didn't exist in the first place. More so because I specifically told him that I know nothing of it and that he shouldn't say that I know about it at all.

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I receive NO apology from him todate.... not even after a letter was sent to my big boss explaining the whole situation and that we wanted an explanation from the person who "accused" me of keeping the license.

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And to top it all, I discovered a few days later, that even though the summonses were wrongly issued out of the ignorance of the government officers, we still had to pay a minimum fine - just to save the faces of the govt officers. Gosh!!! What utter madness. Sometimes, I just shudder at the way things are done here.