Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (BIDA) has asked all registered companies to provide it with information about their foreign employees to get required services from the organisation, sources said.
The services provided by the authority to different industrial units, branches/liaison/regional offices of any foreign company and other business entities include visa recommendations, work permit, extension, amendment and cancellation of work permit, approval to set up office, branches/liaison or regional office, their extension or any changes in approval, relaxation of any conditions and outgoing repatriation, they added.
BIDA on September 17 issued a circular in this regard.
"A company has to certify that it doesn't have any foreign employee without work permit at the time of application for getting BIDA services," according to the circular.
Otherwise, the services mentioned above could not be possible to be provided, it warned.
BIDA also prescribed a format with the circular, seeking the total number of foreign employees, employees with work permit, employees without having work permit and measures taken against the employees who have no work permit.
When asked, BIDA executive chairman Md Sirazul Islam said the move has taken to bring the foreign employment under regulations.
Foreigners are staying in the country with different visas and many of them are working with different projects, officials said, adding that though projects allow them to stay for short time, they must have work permit as they are coming from abroad.
Officials said there is no specific data on foreign employees currently working in the country's different industrial sectors including readymade garment (RMG) and others.
Besides, many of them are illegally staying in Bangladesh, even after expiry of their work permit, thus depriving the government of revenue, they added.
Sources said minimum US$ 5.0 billion in total flows out of the country annually due to hiring of these foreign nationals, in addition to reduction in job opportunities for local people.
BIDA's industrial and commercial wings issue work permit to foreigners but due to lack of expertise, the data available with the authority doesn't show the real figure of current legal foreign employees.
As of March last year, the authority issued 7,642 new industrial work permits to foreigners in the past five years while it also renewed work permits for 11,059 foreign nationals during the period.
The authority also issued some 5,500 new commercial work permits and renewed some 6,300 permits in the last five years.
The industry insiders opined that thousands of foreigners are engaged in the RMG sector, including in garment factories, buying houses, and local liaison offices of global buyers and brands.
The foreigners, working in Bangladesh, are mostly from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China, Taiwan, South Korea and some European and African countries.
Besides RMG, they are engaged in the information technology sector and some other manufacturing industries.
Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA) repeatedly asked its member factories to provide information on foreign nationals working in the country's RMG sector, but got poor response from its member units.
As a result, only 52 factories out of its about 4,500 member units provided information about their 177 foreign personnel until last June, sources added.
Out of the 177 foreign employees, the majority are from India, followed by Sri Lanka, China, South Korea, Pakistan and Turkey.
It showed that the majority of them or 27.1 per cent are engaged in production section, followed by 11.30 per cent in quality control, and 9.0 per cent in sewing.
Besides, 6.2 per cent are engaged in marketing, 5.6 per cent in each of industrial engineering and sample sections, 4.5 per cent in technical, 3.4 per cent in maintenance, and 0.5 per cent in research.
According to the data available from the law enforcement agency until last August, some 3,945 foreigners were working in a total of 7,331 factories in Dhaka, Gazipur, Chattogram, Narayanganj, Mymensingh and Khulna districts.
