The cash-strapped Myanmar junta has formed a committee to force migrant workers to send a quarter of their earnings home through official banking channels.
According to a junta gazette on Oct. 11, the 13-member supervisory committee was formed on Aug. 30 with officials from military intelligence officially known as the Office of the Chief of Military Security Affairs. The committee is tasked with enforcing remittance rules introduced in September last year.
Chaired by Brigadier-General Win Myint Khaing from the Defense Ministry, the committee also numbers Lieutenant Colonel Aung Ko Ko Oo from military intelligence, Police Colonel Oak Soe Tun from Special Branch, and officials from the Bureau of Special Investigation, Finance and Planning, Foreign, Immigration, Commerce, and Labor ministries among its members.
The new remittance regulations, which took effect on Sept. 1 last year, require migrant workers to send home at least 25 percent of their salaries monthly or every three months through the country’s banking system.
The new committee will now try to make sure migrants feed the junta’s foreign currency coffers by pressuring both them and their employment agencies. According to the gazette, it will take action against those who fail to comply, but the punishments were not specified.
The committee is directly answerable to the Foreign Exchange Supervisory Committee—which is tasked with stabilizing exchange rates, and scrutinizing spending of foreign currency on imports of essential commodities that are not produced domestically, such as fuel, medicine, oil, fertilizer and building materials, according to junta media.
The remittance rules require migrant workers to open a joint account in a bank regulated by the junta-controlled Central Bank of Myanmar before they leave and remit 25 percent of their earnings into that account.
The regime has also pressured employment agencies to report migrant workers who fail to send the money.
Traditionally, Myanmar migrants rely on hundi, an informal cross-border credit system of money agents, who take a small fee but convert the money at the market rate of around 4,000 kyats to the U.S. dollar.
But under the new remittance rules, workers’ earnings would be converted at the official exchange rate of around 3,000 to the dollar, severely depleting their value for migrant workers’ families.
In August, the junta’s Labor Ministry began enforcing the new rules on expatriate workers in Thailand, where approximately 5 million licensed and unlicensed Myanmar migrants work.
Last month, it started offering incentives like electric vehicle import licenses for people who send their money home through official banking channels.
The same month, Labor Minister Myint Naung visited Laos and urged Myanmar migrants there to remit their salaries back home.
If effectively enforced, the remittance rules could be a lifesaver for the regime, which is struggling to fund its military operations amid a shortage of dollars.
The withdrawal of foreign investments, economic sanctions by Western countries, and disruptions to border trade by the civil war have exacerbated the shortage since the 2021 coup.
