Many courses to attend on road to renewal of licence

WE are an engineering solutions company registered with the Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB).

Our registration is due for renewal and we have tried to renew it online but were told that we had to fulfil the following compulsory requirements:

> Earn 30 points by attending courses conducted by CIDB or their consultants;

> The director of the company must attend a half-day course on integrity. For this, the company can earn 10 points; and

> For the remaining 20 points, staff of the company would have to attend two courses earning 10 points each.

We visited CIDB to ask about the relevance and necessity to attend these courses and were told that this was the requirement for getting our licence renewed.

Within a few days, a few firms called us to offer some advice/suggestions which they said would help us to earn the points.

One was to send someone else on behalf of the company director to attend the integrity course. For this, our company would be charged RM450 whereas the fee charged by CIDB for the course is only RM75.

For the remaining 20 points, they offered to conduct the courses in their premises for very expensive fees.

We wonder how these consulting firms got the information about companies like us whose licences are due for renewal.

Declining their services, we decided to do the renewal ourself by attending the courses at CIDB.

We registered our director and another person for the integrity course to earn 20 points.

But we faced a problem looking for courses to earn the remaining 10 points as CIDB, according to its website, was not conducting any.

There were only four-day courses available that would garner us 40 points and the fee for each was RM400.

We were surprised because when we visited CIDB earlier, we were told that courses that awarded 10 points were available.

We really do not understand the necessity and purpose of attending all these courses.

Furthermore, we are still wondering how the external firms were able to get in touch with us after we approached CIDB to get more information on the renewal process.

We hope the new government would look seriously into this matter.