Some Indians in Singapore have the privilege of getting bereavement leave, if their company policy permits it; but no one expects an employee to fake a close family member’s death, to the point of forging a death certificate. That is exactly what Singapore Indian employee Barath Gopal, aged 29, did — then he got found out and was fined SGD 4,000 in court for this offence.
On 5 February 2025, a Singapore court fined Gopal after he entered a guilty plea to forgery under the Registration of Births and Deaths Act.
The entire offence of lying and forgery, committed in November and December 2023, appeared to be unnecessary, as Gopal had enough annual leave he could have taken at the time, instead of taking bereavement leave on false grounds.
According to Singapore media reports, Gopal could not focus on his analyst job at a financial services company, after he came to know that his girlfriend had cheated on him.
Feeling downcast, Gopal did not want to go to work, so he decided to misuse the company’s bereavement leave policy to get some paid time off.
His offence was committed on 8 November 2023, when Gopal told his work team leader that his grandfather “had died in his sleep” that very morning, and applied for bereavement leave. As per the company policy, Gopal was granted three days’ bereavement leave.
Gopal’s forgery took place later in the same month, when the company asked him to submit his grandfather’s death certificate in support of his bereavement leave application. This was a paid leave, as per the company policy, so the documentation was necessary.
The Indian employee told the Singapore company that he could not submit the death certificate until his father returned from India on 27 November 2023. The company waited until 7 December 2023, and then the work team leader told Gopal to submit the death certificate by the next day.
Digitally altering a death certificate
In order to produce some kind of a fake document to back up his false story of “grandfather’s death”, Gopal obtained the PDF copy of the death certificate of a friend who had died in July 2023.
Gopal changed the details of this death certificate using a digital tool, inserting his grandfather’s name in place of the late friend’s name, and altered other fields — a fake death certificate number and date; time and place of death; and cause of death.
He submitted a partial image of this digitally morphed death certificate to his Singapore team leader on 11 December 2023, cropping out the QR code at the bottom of the death certificate.
The team leader asked for the whole document photo, and Gopal sent that to him. However, knowing that his company would detect the forgery the moment the QR code was scanned — the name and details in the genuine death records would not match the fake name and details Gopal had submitted — he quit his Singapore job within a week.
The forgery was eventually discovered, and the Singapore company realised that it had been duped out of three days’ pay — nearly SGD 500 — when Gopal took paid bereavement leave based on lies. The company then sued Gopal.
The Indian man got off relatively lightly in the Singapore court, as the punishment for forging a death, birth or stillbirth certificate is up to 10 years in jail, a fine of up to SGD 10,000, or both.
