‘Twin’ MyKad holder hoodwinks EPF

How EPF ended up paying out RM11,257.41 to a woman who is not an account holder is a mystery.

KUCHING: Stories get stranger by the day in Sabah and Sarawak where cases of two people having the same “identity” are not new.

A couple of days ago the local Chinese press here reported that a woman had lodged a police report against the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) for harassing her.

According to article, EPF had on July 3, 2010 credited RM11,257.41 into the woman’s account.

A year later EPF discovered that they had given the money to the wrong woman and wanted her to return the money in full.

According to EPF, the woman who received the money was not even its account holder but had for some strange reason the same MyKad number as the genuine EPF contributor.

On Dec 8 last year, EPF sent the woman a letter demanding she return the RM11,257.41 she received.

The upset woman lodged a police report against EPF last Saturday.

How this mess-up happened is as baffling to EPF as is to the readers.

Said EPF public relations officer manager Nik Affendi Jaafar: “The EPF savings actually belonged to a member who had registered with the EPF back in 1982, and who had somehow shared the same identification card number as the said woman.”

According to Nik Affendi, the woman had misled EPF into believing that she was the account holder.

“She seemed to know that the EPF account holder had the same MyKad number as herself.

“We only realised the mistake a year later when the genuine contributor wanted to withdraw her savings, ” he reportedly told Borneo Post.

He said EPF had, after a thorough investigation, sent the woman a letter on Dec 8 last year demanding that she return the money within 14 days.

Fake ‘twin’ collected BR1M

Yesterday, FMT reported a case in Sabah where a father had approached a local lawyer Ansari Abdullah, who is also Tuaran PKR division chief, with a complaint that his son had a fake “twin”.

The son, Junaidi Justin, had lost his MyKad 10 years ago and was “advised” by the National Registration Department (NRD) not to make a police report and that it would sort the matter out. But that somehow never happened.

When Junaidi went to sign up for the BR1M, he discovered that his fake “twin” had collected the RM500 government aid. The “twin” had also married under his name.

Junaidi is now seeking an explanation from the NRD on how and why they had failed to act on information that it had received over a decade ago.