Legislators Zhang Honglu (from left), Guo Guowen, Zhong Jiabin, and Lin Chuyin held a press conference on "Disappearing 50 Billion in One Year to Reveal Defrauded Migrant Workers and Underground Exchange Techniques" on the 24th.

(Photo by reporter Tu Jianrong)

[Reporter Lin Xinhan/Taipei Report] Legislators Guo Guowen, Zhong Jiabin, Lin Chuyin, and Zhang Honglu, members of the Democratic Progressive Party's "Fraud Squad", held a press conference today on "Disappearing 50 Billion in One Year to Reveal Migrant Fraud and Underground Exchange Techniques". Guo Guowen pointed out that underground exchange has become a one-stop industry, not only infringing on the rights and interests of migrant workers, but also unregulated funds have become a loophole in the system, endangering financial stability, and called on inter-departmental committees to strengthen cooperation and prevention.

The "Fraud Team" put forward five major demands to strengthen the prevention of underground exchange, including the promotion of proper channels by the Financial Supervisory Commission and the Ministry of Labor, and guide migrant workers to follow formal procedures; control illegal channels on digital platforms; give priority to guiding human intermediaries to follow Legal channels, and research on the sunset clauses of human agency agency business; strengthen inspection, including the release of illegal exchange information on social platforms, and investigations by major technology companies; lost contact migrant workers and underground exchange business may be intertwined, and relevant ministries and committees will circulate information and cooperate .

Please read on...

Lai Jiaren, deputy director of the Labor Development Agency of the Ministry of Labor, who participated in the meeting, gave a positive response. He said that information disclosure on legal channels for foreign exchange can be added immediately in publicity such as entry manuals and broadcasts; the management of intermediaries will be strengthened, and they will discuss whether to provide Report bonuses, and cooperate with the Financial Supervisory Commission to strengthen the investigation and punishment of legal cover-up illegal situations.

Chen Jiandao, Assistant Manager of the Foreign Exchange Bureau of the Central Bank, said that it usually takes 2 to 3 days for the intermediary to remit the money back to the home country. I am happy to study it. However, at present, more than 50% of migrant workers are still handled through human agency agencies. At present, we can wait for more operators to enter the migrant worker salary exchange industry. After expanding the scale of the industry, the agency business volume will gradually shrink through natural competition.

According to the data from the Ministry of Labor, about 256,000 Vietnamese are the most migrant workers in Taiwan, followed by 250,000 Indonesians. However, last year, the remittance of migrant workers’ salaries to Vietnam was only 117 million US dollars, while that to Indonesia was as high as 1.748 billion US dollars. According to the current exchange rate conversion, it is estimated that the amount of underground remittance by migrant workers exceeds NT$50 billion a year.

According to Guo Guowen, there are two main reasons why migrant workers tend to use underground money exchange. The first is the language and information barriers, which may cause migrant workers to be unable to identify whether the business is legal or not; Attract migrant workers.

Guo Guowen said that underground exchange companies have developed a set of SOPs. They will use employees of the same nationality to win the trust of migrant workers. After discussing the details of the exchange on Facebook and other social platforms, most of them choose to pay the wages at the technology factory. Go directly to the factory or migrant workers’ dormitory to collect cash, and transfer the funds directly through a local Vietnamese account to evade my country’s financial supervision.

Another channel is that when human resources intermediaries handle salary settlement as an agency, they will use the name of agency to carry out underground exchange, and do illegal exchange by themselves.

In the previous inspection and investigation of the illegal cash flow project, it was found that human intermediaries played an important role in the underground exchange industry through APPs and cooperation with third-party payment companies.