Barath Gopal, a 29-year-old Singapore Indian employee, applied for bereavement leave based on a lie, and then digitally changed his friend’s death certificate to make it look like his grandfather’s death certificate. | Representative image courtesy: Pixabay/Geralt
Some Indians in Singapore have the privilege of taking bereavement leave if the company’s policies allow it. However, no one expects employees to forge the death certificates of close families. That’s exactly what Balas Gopal, a 29-year-old Indian employee in Singapore, did. He was then fined SGD 4,000 in court for this crime.
On February 5, 2025, a Singapore court fined Gopal after receiving a forgery guilty plea under the registration of the Birth and Death Act.
The entire lie and forgery violations committed in November and December 2023 appeared to be unnecessary. Because Gopal didn’t take bereavement leave on false grounds, but had enough annual leave he took at that time.
According to Singapore media reports, Gopal was unable to focus on his analyst work at a financial services company after learning that his girlfriend had deceived him.
Gopal didn’t want to go to work, so he was downcasting, so he misused the company’s bereavement leave policy and decided to take a break from paying times.
His attack was committed on November 8, 2023 when Gopal told his work team leader that his grandfather had applied for bereavement leave, saying that he had “dead about sleep.” In accordance with the company’s policy, Gopal was granted a three-day bereavement leave.
The forgery of Gopal took place later that month, and the company asked him to submit his grandfather’s death certificate to assist him in applying for a bereavement leave. This required document as it was paid leave in accordance with the company’s policy.
An Indian employee told the Singapore company that he was unable to submit his death certificate until his father returned from India on November 27, 2023. The company waited until December 7, 2023, before the work team leader told GoPal to submit the next death certificate. day.
Digitally change your death certificate
To create some kind of fake document to support the false story of “Grandfather’s Death”, Gopal obtained a PDF copy of the death certificate of a friend who passed away in July 2023.
Gopal used a digital tool to change the details of this death certificate, inserting the name of his grandfather in place of the name of his deceased friend, and modifying other fields – fake death certificate number and date . Time and place of death; and the cause of death.
He submitted a partial image of this digitally morphed death certificate to the Singapore Team Leader on December 11, 2023, and cut out the QR code at the bottom of the death certificate.
The team leader asked for the entire documentary photo, and Gopal sent it to him. However, he knew that his company would detect forgery at the moment the QR code was scanned – the name and details of the real death record did not match the fake names and details submitted by Gopal, and Within the week he left his job in Singapore.
The counterfeiting was eventually discovered, and the Singaporean company found that he was cheated on from his three-day salary (almost SGD 500) when Gopal took bereavement leave he paid based on the lies. The company then sued Gopal.
The Indians descended relatively lightly at the Singapore courthouse. The punishment for building a death, birth or stillbirth certificate can be up to 10 years in prison, a fine of 10,000 SGD, or both.
(This article was published in a mutual content partnership arrangement between Free Press Journal and connected to India)
