No records, no defence: how one employer lost a $20K overtime claim
Tribunal Magistrate Joel Tan awarded a migrant worker $20,000 in unpaid overtime on 1 July 2026, rejecting the employer's denial of any overtime.
The case, JHU v JHV, was heard in Singapore's Employment Claims Tribunals. The claimant was a food processing worker on a work permit, employed from around December 2023 to December 2025 and deployed to a Bangladeshi restaurant run by the respondent. His in-principle approval from the Ministry of Manpower set his hours at 44 a week over six days, with a basic salary of $1,500 plus a $500 allowance and overtime at $11.80 an hour. The company had not issued a written key employment terms document as required under section 95A of the Employment Act.
The worker claimed he had actually worked 13 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week, from 1 April to 8 December 2025, totalling 1,848.8 overtime hours. Capped by the tribunal's $20,000 jurisdictional limit, he claimed that sum rather than the fuller $21,815.84 the hours would otherwise have generated. The company denied liability entirely, its office manager, director and a chef witness maintaining that the worker never worked beyond an eight-hour shift and that staff overtime was paid in cash on the day.
The worker's evidence rested on an attendance table compiled after his employment ended, based on handwritten notes he said he kept from March 2025, and punch card photographs from mid-2024 corroborating a pattern of early starts and late finishes. He also produced a photograph of himself at a facial recognition machine at an adjacent, related restaurant, which the company's representative said he had no permission to use.
The tribunal rejected the employer's argument that the scale of the claim made it inherently improbable. Drawing on extra-judicial writing about judges projecting their own assumptions onto litigants from unfamiliar backgrounds, it found there was "an element of overreach in our asserting what would be expected in given circumstances" when assessing how a foreign worker might respond to poor conditions. Fear of repatriation and difficulty switching employers, it noted, could reasonably explain years of silence followed by a claim only after termination.
The tribunal also noted that the overtime claimed exceeded the statutory caps in sections 38(5) and 38(8) of the Employment Act, limiting overtime to 72 hours a month and daily work to 12 hours. Citing the High Court's decision in Hossain Rakib v Ideal Design & Build Pte Ltd, it held these caps protect employees and cannot shield an employer from paying for work actually performed.
Central to the outcome was the company's failure to produce attendance records. Section 95 of the Employment Act requires employers to keep such records and make them accessible to employees. The tribunal found the company had maintained records, pointing to evidence that a related company operated a shared facial recognition system, and that its denial triggered an adverse inference under section 21(2) of the Employment Claims Act that the withheld evidence would have been unfavourable to it.
The tribunal also found the company's account inconsistent: with only three staff covering a restaurant open roughly 6am to 11pm, its described shift pattern left gaps only overtime work could plausibly fill.
The claim succeeded in full. Tribunal Magistrate Joel Tan stated: "I allowed the claim in full and awarded the claimant the sum of $20,000." The company was also ordered to pay $400 in costs and $60 in disbursements.
The tribunal noted that an employer with proper attendance records could easily have disproved the claim by pointing to specific days the worker's account did not match. Because no such records were produced, the dispute was resolved in the worker's favour.
