Saturday, February 09, 2019

Improve the grants scene in Singapore

The two cheating cases - a senior executive duping Spring Singapore and the SkillsFuture scam - sum up the dismal state of the grants landscape in Singapore (8 more charged in $40 million SkillsFuture fraud case, Jan 12; and Spring S'pore exec admits to duping agency of $155,000, Feb 1).

In rolling out a series of programmes and grants designed to help Singaporeans upskill and local businesses strengthen their capabilities, the Government has unfortunately bred grant officers who have never worked in the industry and therefore lack experience in evaluating whether there is true value-add as a result of the grant money spent.

This had also led to entrepreneurs whose key business strategy is to leverage government grants. For many of them, the outcomes do not need to be sustainable as the funding takes care of the costs.

As a result, despite the millions of dollars in grant money being dispensed over the years, our country's productivity and innovation needles have barely shifted, and Singapore companies continue to struggle internationally.

I propose the following:



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Minus all the vouchers. Minus all the GST. Make it mandatory for the elderly children to support the elders or they can use their HDB to support themselves. LKY was right. Once you start all these complicated vouchers where and when will it stop at!

Anonymous said...

They have done the calculations. Giving vouchers only benefits a small handful. Abolish GST every person gain other than the government.

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