SINGAPORE - Undeterred by the fact that he was working in a police building, a 33-year-old man forged customer satisfaction survey forms that were required for an audit.

Muhammad Khairi Suhaimi was fined $3,000 on Friday (Sept 10), after pleading guilty to a charge of forgery. He was represented by lawyer Azri Imran Tan.

Khairi was working for real estate management firm C&W Services (S) when he committed the offence some time between December last year and February this year.

The company was contracted to manage the facilities of the Ministry of Home Affairs' (MHA) properties, and Khairi was assigned as a building manager for the Police Cantonment Complex.

As stipulated in the contract, the company was required to obtain feedback from users of the properties by conducting half-yearly customer satisfaction surveys.

The outcome of the surveys would be collated and a satisfaction score would be computed.

The company would have been awarded a $1,000 performance incentive for a high score. It would have been penalised between $300 and $800 for a low one.

In December last year, the Auditor-General's Office called for an audit on the facilities management of MHA's properties. It also asked for supporting documents for the customer satisfaction surveys carried out between April 2018 and March last year.

Khairi realised that he had not completed the survey forms for the Police Cantonment Complex when he received an e-mail from the police asking for them.

He managed to get a logistics officer from the Criminal Investigation Department, Mr Krishna Prasad, to complete the forms for the half-yearly periods between Jan 1, 2019, and June 30 last year.

But Khairi did not have the documents for the two periods in 2018.

He then forged them using another form previously submitted for the audit period of 2017. He had received the older document from Mr Tan Peng Lin, a logistics officer for the Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB).

But Mr Tan later asked Khairi about the two forms that were purportedly completed by him, even though he had not filled them up. He also noted that they were similar to a previous form he had submitted.

During a meeting with representatives from the police, CNB and C&W to clarify the authenticity of the forms, Khairi confessed to the forgery.

The court heard that he had committed the forgery out of convenience and did not gain financially from it.

For committing forgery, Khairi could have been jailed for up to four years, fined, or both.