MoLTM had asked Ministry of Finance (MoF), Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA), Ministry of Industry (MoI), Ministry of Information and Communications (MoIC), Ministry of Home (MoH), Ministry of Physical Planning and Works (MPPW) and Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare (MoWCSW) to provide information regarding foreign workers in different organizations.[break]
Foreign citizen are found working mainly in diplomatic missions, non-governmental organizations, manufacturing and services sectors, many of them without obtaining necessary permission from the government - a violation of existing Labor Act 1991.
The government has been losing around Rs 10 billion in income tax, social security tax and registration cost.
The government has brought foreign workers under the tax net when the current Prime Minister Dr Baburam Bhattarai was the Finance Minister in 2007.
"We have not received any response from these ministries though we have been repeatedly requesting them for a couple of months to inform us about the status of all foreigners working in Nepal," said Krishna Hari Puskar, under-secretary of MoLTM.
According to the ministry´s estimates, more than 50,000 non-diplomatic foreign workers excluding Indians are working without government permission.
Data compiled by the Department of Labor (DoL) shows only around 7,000 foreign workers have received labor permit from the government so far. "We have no precise idea about foreign workers, their number, the workplaces, their remuneration, among others," said Puskar.
Process of monitoring and penalizing the organizations employing such illegal workers as announced by MoLTM has not been materialized due to indifferent attitude of the ministries.
Worse, MoFA has introduced Diplomatic Code of Conduct 2011 a month ago barring other ministries from directly approaching any of the foreign workers for any sort of information without consulting it.
"It´s really unfair. MoFA has imposed a syndicate system. The ministry neither cooperates with us nor let us obtain information on our own," said a senior officer at MoLTM.
However, officials at MoFA claimed that the ministry has been working to provide the information as desired by MoLTM.
"The ministry needs to do some homework to collect the information about these workers. Once we compile the data, we will provide it to MoLTM, " said Tirtha Wagle, under-secretary at MoFA.
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