SINGAPORE – A woman was sentenced to eight weeks’ jail for defrauding Enterprise Singapore of $30,000, the police said on Thursday (July 16).

Between November 2012 and March 2013, 43-year-old Singaporean Angela Sim, the director of ENCE Marketing Group, a public relations and marketing firm, had cheated the government agency – then known as Spring Singapore – to the tune of $30,000 under its Innovation and Capability Voucher scheme.

The police said that Sim had pleaded guilty to three counts of cheating.

Nine similar cheating charges were taken into consideration for the purposes of sentencing.

The scheme was launched by Spring Singapore in June 2012 to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) ramp up their capabilities.

The SMEs could apply for these vouchers, each capped at $5,000, to defray the costs of engaging service providers to improve productivity and for service diagnoses.

Only approved consultants from pre-qualified service providers could undertake capability upgrading projects for SMEs.

Once the projects were completed, the service provider had to submit documentation to Spring Singapore as proof of its service in order to claim the subsidy.

ENCE Marketing Group, then known as ROI Strategy Consultants, was a pre-qualified service provider under the scheme.

The company, under the instructions of Sim, submitted 12 claims to Spring Singapore, in which it said that an approved consultant from the firm had performed capability upgrading services for 12 SMEs.

These submissions were false and no such services had been rendered.

Spring Singapore had initially paid out a total of $30,000 to the company for six of the claims, before these were detected as fraudulent.

As a result, the six remaining claims were rejected.

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