Kuala Lumpur: Employers and worker organisations want the government to suspend the amnesty programme for the 1.2 million illegal workers which began monday, arguing that the ongoing exercise to register legal workers using the biometric system was incomplete and riddled with problems.

“To carry out both exercises in parallel was a massive task which the authorities were unable to handle,” Malaysian Employers Federation (MEF) executive director Shamsuddin Bardan said Monday.

The original plan was to begin the amnesty programme on July 11, but this was postponed because the home ministry incurred problems appointing agents while the machinery to register was not in place.

Instead, the ministry decided to carry out the biometric system of registering legal workers, beginning two weeks ago, and was still in progress with no definite dateline to complete.

Shamsuddin said the current biometric system of registration for legal workers was riddled with so many problems that it needed to be ironed out fast before it could be concluded.

So far, only 600,000 legal workers out of the estimated 1.2 million have been registered.

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