Many of the management companies appointed for the 6P programme have been found to modify the government biometric equipment used to register illegal immigrants, and will be investigated by the police.
Home Ministry senior deputy secretary-general Alwi Ibrahim said today that about 600 sets of the equipment had been found to have been modified and no longer met government-set specifications.
The ministry, which has been monitoring the execution of the programme, discovered that the companies had engaged illegal IT consultants to modify the system used in the registration and legalisation of illegal immigrants programme or 6P, he said in a statement.
“The irresponsible action has caused damage to the system that has been coordinated by the ministry and at the same time protected under the Official Secrets Act,” Alwi said.
“As a result, data taken from the workers and illegal immigrants failed to be uploaded into the main server of the Immigration Department for aggregation with other statistics received from across the country.”
Alwi warned the other management companies not to make any similar attempt.
He said that companies needing technical assistance should refer to the one-stop counter of the ministry in Putrajaya.
Alwi also said that 1,637,725 illegal immigrants and legal foreign workers have been registered under the 6P Programme up to yesterday.
He said that 830,837 of them were registered through the Registration of Legal Foreign Workers Programme which was started on July 13.
– Bernama