Hon. Wheatley while speaking in the House of Assembly on December 13 said, “As we continue the reformation of those two departments. We are moving those two services online it should be very soon, we are waiting on one last thing to do – that is to collect money online.”.

In elaborating further on what the commencement of the online services will mean for the monitoring component of the Departments the Minister said, “Hopefully within the next couple of weeks we can take that whole process of work permits online. What does automatically, it frees up staff. Once staff is freed up then we can go and do more surveillance work.”

Hon. Wheatley explained that these visits by the officers will uncover activities and occurrences in places of employment that the Labour Department is unaware of. “There is a lot of things happening in the workforce that we cant see because we don’t have the man power to go and do the surveillance. We do the very same thing for immigration,” Hon. Wheatley told the House.

“You’re going to see going forward – a lot more field work in those two areas [Labour and Immigration]; because we have to take care of our people in our workforce. A lot of times particularly young ladies are taken advantage of in the workforce,” he added.