Unrefunded, illegal fees at centre of immigration dispute
Filipino-Canadians say they were left high and dry by recruiter who pledged to help relatives find jobs
Bebiang Merry Tobes claims that she is owed thousands of dollars by a woman who she says illegally collected fees from her to find work for her relatives as live-in caregivers.
In March 2013, Tobes says, she gave Erlinda Maravillas $8,000 to produce labour market impact assessments and employment contracts for her two nieces and a nephew through the temporary foreign worker program, but the documents never materialized.
She is one of many in the Filipino-Canadian community in Toronto who believe they were duped by Maravillas and want their money back.
Approached outside her North York apartment building while entering her recently purchased 2006 BMW X3, Maravillas admitted to collecting recruitment fees, which employers are required by law to cover, from applicants’ families until 2013.
Charging caregivers, instead of employers, for placement has been illegal since 2009.
The penalty is a fine of up to $50,000 and up to a year in jail.
“I used to do it,” said Maravillas, who ran Lynn’s Local and International Placement Agency from 1999 to 2014. “But no more.”
Maravillas said she’s lost count of how many people she’s helped in bring their relatives into the country, as live-in caregivers, from such countries as the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and Israel.
She has not collected any recruitment fees from would-be caregivers or their families in the past two years, she says.
“These employers who I always help, they call me because I don’t charge,” Maravillas said. “I don’t charge the employer. I didn’t charge them even five cents.”
“The thing is, the employer will not pay,” said Maravillas, explaining why she didn’t charge employers the recruitment fees instead, as the law stipulates.
To hire a foreign caregiver, prospective employers need a positive labour-market impact assessment, which demonstrates the need to hire a worker from abroad instead of from within Canada.
In December, the cost of an LMIA application increased to $1,000 from $275. Employers are also required to advertise the position on websites such as Monster and Workopolis to prove there’s a shortage of Canadians to fill it.
A year-and-a-half after she handed Maravillas $8,000 in cash, Tobes said, there was no evidence that any progress had been made on the application.
Maravillas said, however, that Tobes didn’t wait long enough before cancelling her application, which takes many months to process.
When Tobes asked that her money be returned, Maravillas made incremental payments until October, bringing the balance down to $6,650, and then started ignoring her calls, Tobes said.
“I keep calling her and texting her, sometimes bad words because I’m upset,” said Tobes, who is also a caregiver. “She doesn’t respond.”
“I’m stressed for a long time,” she said. “It’s big money for me. I work hard.”
Maravillas said she doesn’t answer the phone sometimes because she has reception issues, but denied staying out of touch on purpose. Since speaking with the Star, she has reached out to Tobes and promised to return her money.
Maravillas, who now makes her living as a cleaner and babysitter, said reimbursement has always been her intention, but thus far she’s been unable to save up enough to repay Tobes in full.
In another case, Luisa Bucauyu said she gave Maravillas $2,500 to bring her nephew to Canada from the Philippines in 2012.
“After that, I kept calling her to remind her about the papers and she told me it was being processed,” Bucauyu said. “But now I’ve lost contact with her.”
When they spoke about a year ago, Maravillas told her the employer she had lined up for Bucauyu’s nephew had backed out and decided to put their elderly parents in a nursing home instead, Bucauyu said.
And Luciel Sy says she gave Maravillas $1,700 in the fall of 2012 to find an employer for her fiancé, who she had hoped would join her in Canada.
“She promised to bring him here and find an employer for him,” said Sy, whose fiancé now lives in Qatar. “She took the money, and she’s gone.
“I have been calling her a million times, and she promised me that she was doing it, but then she said the elderly man passed away,” Sy said.
Maravillas said Sy and Bucauyu also cancelled their applications in the middle of the process, but since being approached by the Star, she’s also contacted them to say she will repay them in August, both parties confirm.
Tobes, Sy and Bucauyu are not the first people to raise concerns about the legitimacy of Maravillas’s business.
In August 2014, a Metro story outlined the experiences of five other people, three of them identified and two who spoke without being named, who reported similar issues.
Documents show that Maravillas was taken to small claims court twice in 2014. In both cases, women claimed that they had paid fees — in 2011 and 2012 — for help in finding employment for their relatives, but that at the time they filed their claims, no work had been done.
One claim was abandoned. A contempt hearing for the other has been set for Thursday.
Maravillas has been named as a defendant in 10 other small claims cases between 2003 and 2010, but the Star could not confirm the outcome of those.
Lynn’s, Maravillas’s former company, is defunct, she said. A business called ESM Recruitment Agency was registered in 2014 under her name, but Maravillas said she’s done making money through recruiting.
Maravillas initially said she had proof of the work she did on Tobes’, Bucauyu’s and Sy’s applications. Later, though, she then said she could not find Tobes’ paperwork, and that the rest must have been destroyed when her apartment was flooded in the summer of 2014.
She said the money she earned from her business, which she ran full-time until 2014, was sent back to the Philippines to help her father, who was ill.
Police wouldn’t say whether they’re investigating Maravillas. A statement from Citizenship and Immigration Canada said that privacy laws prevented it from speaking about individual cases.
The Canadian Border Services Agency, which investigates complaints and tips about the contravention of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, wrote in an email that “it is not a practice of the CBSA to confirm/deny whether a person is under investigation.”
The Ministry of Labour, which would normally investigate violations of the Employment Standards Act and the Employment Protection for Foreign Nationals Act (EPFNA), has not received any complaints against Maravillas.
In 2009, after a Star investigation uncovered widespread fraud in the live-in caregiver program, the Ontario government passed the EPFNA, which made charging caregivers a recruitment or placement fee to work in the province illegal.
Maravillas said she thought the law had changed more recently.
She said recruiting was easy before the law was so strict and insisted that she no longer charges for it, but continues to help employers through the process. They rely on her, she said, because she doesn’t charge them for her services. With files from Dale Brazao