KUALA LUMPUR – Bestinet Sdn Bhd, the provider of the Foreign Workers Centralized Management System (FWCMS) for holistic and digital foreign worker management, has responded to various questions and allegations frequently directed at the company.
In a statement issued through its legal firm, Lui & Bhullar, the company founded by Datuk Seri Aminul Islam Abdul Nor said the current criticism does not reflect good-faith policy discourse as certain public figures have used these national infrastructure systems as instruments of political positioning by making false allegations based on selective and decontextualised data.
“Their opposition is not principled governance advocacy. It is the defence of a financial ecosystem that has profited for decades from the exploitation of vulnerable migrant workers.
“Bestinet will take all necessary legal action against false, misleading or defamatory statements,” said the statement.
Commenting further on the Foreign Workers Centralised Management System (FWCMS), it said, the system had eliminated billions in annual leakage previously flowing through informal intermediaries.
“Before FWCMS, Malaysia’s foreign worker management ecosystem was manual, fragmented and vulnerable to abuse, with no digital records, no audit trail and no accountability. Ministries operated in silos with no integration. Employers queued as early as 3 a.m. at government counters, creating repeated opportunities for illicit and unrecorded payments,
“In the vast majority of cases, medical reports and insurance documents were falsified. In many cases, workers sent imposters to medical screenings. Quota applications were manually manipulated through collusion between employers, brokers and intermediaries, generating artificial demand to extract money from vulnerable workers who often arrived in debt bondage,
“Derived from industry assessments and historical observations, the Financial leakages ran into the billions of ringgit,” it said.
However, since Bestinet introduced FWCMS and transformed the ecosystem, it undertook a privately funded national initiative to build a world-class digital solution at zero cost to the Government or taxpayer.
“FWCMS is a 15-module cross-border governance platform, the first of its kind globally, integrating 15 labour-sending countries, 232 accredited medical centres and every relevant Malaysian government agency into one unified digital ecosystem,
“The system was developed following more than 500 formal engagements with Malaysian government agencies, recommended by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), Special Branch, Malaysia, and designed in accordance with the principles and policies of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM),
“It received formal government approval through the SST in 2018 and concession agreement in 2024 following a comprehensive inter-ministerial evaluation including review by UKAS,” said the statement.
Assertions that the fee structure represents an increase are factually incorrect in fact after a negotiation with the UKAS the revised fee absorbed the previous separate services like PLKS, ISC and medical screening, overall representing a significant reduction, it added.
Also to be noted that Bestinet provided its services without any fee collections from 2012 to 2018, said the statement.
As for the global recognition, FWCMS, among other local and international awards, was awarded the United Nations World Summit Award (WSA) in 2017 in Vienna, Austria, competing against entries from over 180 countries, widely regarded as the world’s most prestigious recognition for digital innovation aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
More than a decade after implementation, no comparable system exists anywhere in the world, it said.
For TURAP as the next frontier in worker protection, to Bestinet’s knowledge, no government or employer body anywhere in the world today possesses effective mechanisms to oversee, verify or govern this layer — where the most acute exploitation of migrant workers occurs, according to the statement.
“The Universal Recruitment Advanced Platform (TURAP) is the first platform of its kind in the world, developed drawing on nearly 40 years of cumulative industry experience. It is designed to
complement, not replace, FWCMS, MyIMMS, NIISe and all other Government systems, operating at a distinct upstream layer to eliminate recruitment exploitation at its source,” it added.
On concerns related to national security and sovereignty, Bestinet has contractually committed to transfer full ownership of FWCMS to the Government upon contract completion.
“Every Government decision on FWCMS, from the 2012 POC, through mandatory adoption in 2015, to the 2024 formal contract — resulted from rigorous, multi-layered institutional processes including inter-ministerial consultations, security assessments, international advisory input and over a decade of evidence-based performance review,
“Any characterisation of these decisions as irregular, improper or influenced by extraneous factors undermines the institutional integrity of Malaysia’s executive decision-making,” it said.
