Women punished for helping firms evade Saudization

The Ministry of Labor caught 500 Saudi women involved in fake Saudization efforts in the past year. The women colluded with business owners and some businesses to falsely represent themselves as having achieved the required Saudization percentage for the companies that will prevent them from lapsing into the red category.
The human resources fund Hadaf came to know about the fraud and punished the girls by depriving them of its services.
An informed source told a local newspaper that the cases that have been discovered were punished by depriving the women of the fund’s services for three years, in addition to imposing fines on the businesses involved in the fraud.
The fund said in a statement: “We are talking here about the fake number of Saudi females in establishments. The number of cases are much higher among the Saudi males.”
A woman, who declined to be named, said that she had been deprived of the services of the fund for three years. She said that she only worked at the establishment for two years and then resigned. “However, the business decided to keep my name on the payroll so as not to lose its status and lapse into the red category. It’s not my fault. I found out about this only after checking with the Social Insurance, when they asked me to get a clearance from the company in which I used to work,” she said.
The General Organization for Social Insurance (GOSI) has launched a service on its website for persons who want to make sure if they are still part of the social insurance system. The reason for this is to expose those businesses that are involved in fake Saudization by keeping the names of Saudi employees on their payroll even after they have left the company.
The woman asked Hadaf to give Saudis the benefit of the doubt and check with them before imposing any penalties. “They should give us a chance to defend ourselves,” she said.