Fair Consideration Framework: what MOM tests in practice

The rule and the exemptions

Before applying for an Employment Pass or S Pass, an employer must advertise the role on MyCareersFuture, the national jobs portal, for at least 14 consecutive days, and must consider all applicants fairly. The advertisement must show a salary range whose maximum does not exceed twice the minimum and which includes the salary to be offered to the foreign candidate; the occupation must match the pass application; the advertising employer must be the applying employer; no job offer may be made during the 14 days; and an advertisement that has been closed for more than three months cannot support an application. Changing the hiring entity, occupation, salary or number of vacancies restarts the clock.

Five exemptions apply: firms with fewer than 10 employees; roles paying a fixed monthly salary of S$22,500 or more; roles of one month or less; local transfers of an existing employee within a group; and overseas intra-corporate transferees under the WTO GATS or an FTA definition. MOM states that exempt employers must still practise fair hiring under the Tripartite Guidelines on Fair Employment Practices, and it strongly encourages advertising even exempt roles.

Those are the mechanics. They are the part of the framework that employers can see, and the part that compliance functions tend to check. They are not what MOM primarily tests.

What MOM is looking for

The Fair Consideration Framework was introduced in 2014 and has been enforced since 2016 through workforce analytics. MOM compares each firm's profile with its sector: the share of foreign PMETs relative to peers, and the concentration of PMETs from a single nationality. In a 2020 announcement placing 47 further employers on its Watchlist, MOM noted that 18 of them had foreigners making up more than half of their PMET workforce, that all 30 of the financial and professional services firms in the batch showed high concentration of one nationality, and that one firm had almost three-quarters of its PMETs from a single country. MOM said at the time that it had scrutinised more than 1,200 employers since 2016 and had identified a further 240 for investigation into possible pre-selection of foreign candidates.

The same signals now drive COMPASS. The C3 diversity criterion scores the candidate's nationality share among the firm's PMETs, and C4 scores the firm's local PMET share against its sector. A firm whose profile would once have put it on the Watchlist now also scores 0 on two of the four foundational criteria. The framework and the points test are two expressions of the same policy.

Beyond data, MOM looks at behaviour. Its published examples of breaches are pre-selecting a foreign candidate and advertising only as a formality without reviewing MyCareersFuture applicants, and publishing discriminatory advertisements. Both are detectable: the first from the gap between applicants received and applicants interviewed, the second from the advertisement itself.

The Watchlist, debarment and prosecution

An employer placed on the Watchlist has every Employment Pass application closely scrutinised, and the Tripartite Alliance for Fair and Progressive Employment Practices engages with it to review its hiring. Firms that are uncooperative or recalcitrant have their work-pass privileges curtailed. MOM reported that of 190 financial and professional services firms placed on the Watchlist since 2016, more than 100 had exited after improving their practices.

Administrative penalties were raised in January 2020. The minimum debarment from work-pass privileges for a firm found to have hired unfairly is 12 months, and up to 24 months for more serious cases. Debarment now covers renewals as well as new applications: a 12-month debarment blocks the renewal of one third to one half of the firm's work passes, and a 24-month debarment can affect all of them and stop the firm hiring any new foreign employee. For a firm that depends on foreign PMETs, debarment is not a fine; it is an operational event.

Prosecution sits above that. An employer or key personnel who falsely declares that candidates were fairly considered commits an offence under the Employment of Foreign Manpower Act, punishable by up to two years' imprisonment, a fine of up to S$20,000, or both. The declaration is made in every EP application. It is personal, and it is the declaration that MOM's data analytics are designed to test.

The Workplace Fairness Act, passed in two parts in 2025 and expected to take effect towards the end of 2027, will add a statutory prohibition on discrimination on grounds including nationality, with exceptions that allow a preference for Singapore citizens and PRs. Until then the Tripartite Guidelines and the FCF's administrative regime apply.

What a compliant recruitment looks like

A recruitment that would withstand MOM's scrutiny has five features, none of them about the advertisement alone.

The vacancy is real and defined before the candidate. A job description, salary band and reporting line exist before anyone is identified, and the foreign candidate's package falls within them. Where a specific foreign candidate was in mind from the start, as is often true for a group transfer, the honest course is to consider whether an exemption applies and, if not, to run a genuine search rather than a staged one.

Applicants are reviewed and the review is recorded. Every MyCareersFuture applicant is considered against the same criteria, with a short written note of why each was or was not progressed. Interviews of Singaporean applicants who met the criteria are documented. The file shows the comparison, not just the outcome.

The reason for the foreign hire is job-related. Skills, experience and fit for the role, not nationality, language preference unrelated to the work or familiarity to the hiring manager. If a Singaporean applicant was comparably qualified, the file explains the choice.

The firm's profile is managed, not just its filings. A firm with rising foreign PMET share or single-nationality concentration should know it from the Workforce Insights tool before MOM does, and should have a local hiring and development plan it can describe.

The declaration is made by someone who has read the file. The fair-consideration declaration is a personal statement by the employer or its key personnel. It should be signed by someone who has seen the recruitment record and would be prepared to explain it.

Why this matters beyond compliance

In mobility-capital terms the Fair Consideration Framework is the mechanism by which Singapore insists that a foreign professional's role is real, benchmarked and complementary. A transferee hired through a genuine search, at a salary set by the market, into a team that is mixed, has a Singapore record that means something: the role was tested against local candidates and the firm's profile, and it was approved. That is the record a North American or European authority reads later, and the record on which a Singapore PR application is assessed.

A transferee hired through a formality, into a firm whose profile puts it on the Watchlist, has a pass that may be scrutinised, a renewal that may be refused and a record that reads as placement rather than work. For a family enterprise placing a successor in its Singapore affiliate, the discipline of a genuine recruitment is not an obstacle to the plan; it is what makes the plan credible. WG's ongoing-compliance service is scoped to keep recruitment files, workforce profiles and pass conditions in the state that MOM's tests assume.