CHALY Mah, chairman of the Singapore Land Authority, likes to tell this story about what used to happen whenever the land agency got calls from the public about fallen trees blocking the road during a big storm.
"Whose responsibility is it to move this tree? If the tree is lying on the road, it is LTA (Land Transport Authority). If the tree is sitting on NParks (National Parks Board) land, it is NParks' problem. And if the tree happens to be sitting on state land, then SLA has to take responsibility."
These were the "Is it our tree, not our tree?" sort of questions that SLA staff would start asking themselves.
"So basically I said: 'Doesn't matter; if we get the call, just go and get it fixed because the public views us as one government. And if, at the end of the day, it is NParks' or LTA's responsibility, we will sort it out among the various government agencies later.'"
To Mr Mah, inter-agency cooperation is key. It's perhaps also an example of how the veteran accountant has brought his private-sector experience - he wears a few Deloitte hats in the region, including CEO of Deloitte Asia Pacific - to bear at the government agency he has chaired for the past four years.
Looking back, "the big change that I have seen in SLA is that the engagement with the public and the stakeholders has improved big time", he tells BT.
"I think that is very important because when they don't understand why we are doing certain things, then we become the bad guy. The noise around us being the bad guy has actually come down significantly."
Whether in matters of land acquisition, or in its role as custodian of state land, preparing the ground to take back some golf course land, or even its handling of the infamous 2010 fraud case in its technology and infrastructure department, SLA has become more transparent and open in communicating with the public, its customers and media, in Mr Mah's view.
"I get a lot of satisfaction out of that. I think that has improved the profile of SLA," he says. "Today, the mindset is about serving all our stakeholders and communicating more openly with them."
Besides the general public and customers, SLA's stakeholders include tenants, lessees and even property owners whose land is being acquired. SLA has come up with what might be described as "gentler" land acquisition procedures - not just for property owners but also for its own staff.
"Under the Land Acquisition Act, when we acquire a property, it requires us to paste this notice that says: 'Your property has been acquired', and it really irks the owners because, here you are coming to tell me you want to take my property and you stick this thing in front of my gate and so on. Immediately the owners would just take it off. And our officers told us every time they went down, they would get abused.
"So I said: 'Why do we make it so offensive? Why don't we take that piece of paper, talk to them and then just hand it over to them?' From our perspective, we have served the notice on them. So this is what we have done, a small tweaking in the procedure but, at least, it is more human."
This new procedure was first used in early 2011 for land acquired for the construction of the North-South Expressway and again during the 2012 acquisitions for the Thomson Line. The latter exercise included the acquisition of Pearls Centre in Chinatown.
"Pearls Centre was a big undertaking. We deployed officers. We started to give coaching to our Land Acquisition Department because in the earlier days, these people were really traumatised. It was very hard to retain people. Our staff would say: 'Why do I want to be the bad person, taking away people's property?' So there's a lot of emotion. It's not so much about whether the property owners are going to be fairly compensated because today we fairly compensate all of them.
"In fact, in some cases the compensation is more than fair. But it is the emotion attached to the property. They've been living there for the past 20 to 30 years. Now we're asking them to relocate. So we gave coaching, counselling lessons to our people so that they know how to deal with this sort of situation and, of course, in the Pearls Centre case, we also provided them support with security guards just in case people got rough."
The lie of the land
Enhanced stakeholder engagement was also evident in SLA's handling of the decision in February this year not to extend some golf course leases. "The good thing about that exercise was that we started engaging the stakeholders, the golf clubs, very early, in March 2013. The policies were not even firm at the time. We went out there and we met with golf clubs in small groups consisting of president and chairman, just to talk about things, just to get their feedback so that it will help us decide on the policy."
When Mr Mah, himself a golfer, turned up at some of these golf courses, his friends used to say: "What are you trying to do and why are you making life difficult for us?"
He had to put things in perspective. "This policy is hinged on the fact that we are land-scarce. Something that the golfers have chosen to forget is that all the golf courses are on leases. Because we kept renewing them all the time in the past, golfers just kept thinking they are automatically renewed, and have forgotten that there is a landlord and the golf club is basically a tenant. At the end of the day, the engagement was good. They understood why we had to do that. So I am glad that a potential political hot potato has been pretty well managed from my perspective."
Transparency and open coummunication was also the strategy Mr Mah adopted in steering SLA during the 2010 fraud case when two officers - Koh Seah Wee and Lim Chai Meng - cheated the agency of about S$12 million with fake claims for IT services by "vendors" who did not provide such services.
Not one to shy away from discussing difficult issues, Mr Mah in fact chooses to begin this interview with the topic. "One of the first things we did was we said: 'Look, it has happened. We cannot hide our head in the sand and not deal with this openly. Let's be transparent about it and engage the press and say as much as we can.'"
An independent review panel was set up to determine how the fraud happened and to see how SLA could strengthen its internal processes and controls to prevent a recurrence. In hindsight, one thing Mr Mah wishes SLA had done at the time was to have treated the two officers, who were seconded from the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), as its own employees. "If we had done that, maybe we could have kept a closer watch. So that's something that I thought, perhaps, could have been done differently.
"Nevertheless, the fraud happened, and we went very quickly after the people and we soon found out, as part of the investigation, that they were really in cahoots with outside parties. Basically they were creating fictitious invoices for services that were never rendered to SLA, and they kept them within procurement limits that they were authorised to approve, and there were multiples of these transactions with 'vendors'. These are not real vendors but people outside with whom they had made arrangements to send these invoices to SLA, and they shared with them the ill-gotten gains."
The duo perpetrated the scam from 2008 to 2010. SLA discovered the fraud in June 2010 and, to date, has recovered about S$10 million. They are now in jail. Following the incident, Mr Mah, guided SLA to put in place stricter controls. Approvals for payment for any quotations or tenders now have to be reviewed by people who are not in the department concerned. Approval limits have also been lowered.
SLA chief executive Vincent Hoong was also asked to share the experience and lessons learnt with other government agencies. There were also other good outcomes from the episode. Noting that the two fraudsters had begun their scam almost from Day One of their secondment to SLA, Mr Mah alerted Mr Hoong to warn the other government agencies where the duo had previously worked, to look into their activities there. True enough, offences committed by Koh, albeit involving a smaller amount, were also uncovered at the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore and the Supreme Court.
The episode has also led SLA to use data analytics across its entire procurement process, to better detect suspicious transactions. "This is something other stat boards have also learnt to do," Mr Mah notes. He also guided SLA to extend the use of data analytics in a more holistic manner and put in place an Enterprise Risk Management framework covering not only fraud but other risk areas such as reputation, data security/privacy, compliance, service delivery, illegal dumping and encroachment of state land.
For the mindset transformation at SLA - to one of serving stakeholders, and being transparent - Mr Mah gives credit to SLA's board comprising 15 members from a diverse range of fields including accounting, risk management, IT, public relations, media, architecture and law. "A lot of us come from the private sector and the so-called advice we give to management is - this is how the private sector would deal with it. When there is a problem, talk about it openly." Board members have also helped the agency become more innovative.
Mr Mah himself is said to have helped shape SLA's current vision statement, Limited Land, Unlimited Space, rolled out in April 2011 to guide the authority in seeking innovative ways to optimise the use of state land. These include opening up the Rail Corridor - on the former Keretapi Tanah Melayu railway track between the former Tanjong Pagar Railway Station and Woodlands - as a green corridor for the public. The former Tanjong Pagar station is now a popular venue for events such as fashion shows, product launches and wedding photoshoots.
SLA has also tenanted out the space under Thomson Flyover to a private operator for use as a popular futsal (indoor football) venue and helped rejuvenate iconic heritage properties such as black-and-white bungalows and Alkaff Mansion. It has also put state properties to interim uses to earn rental yields before the properties are allocated more permanent use in accordance with the Urban Redevelopment Authority's Master Plan. An example would be Dempsey Hill, formerly an enclave of army barracks but today transformed into a thriving F&B hub.
Mapping out terrain
Mr Mah is also proud of SLA's OneMap portal, an integrated map system that provides location-based services and information to the public. "We managed to get the whole of government to collaborate on this project," he says. On top of being the most up-to-date map of Singapore, the portal serves a myriad of functions. For instance, an entrepreneur can use OneMap's PopulationQuery to find suitable locations to set up childcare centres, or a doctor might want to find the most suitable street in a housing estate to open a clinic catering to elderly patients.
Another geospatial intiative under way at SLA is 3D mapping for the whole of Singapore, including aerial views and road views. "When completed by 2016, it will, for instance, help PUB better manage the flood problem - because they can see where the rainfall is, and where the water will flow through," Mr Mah notes. The 3D map will also contribute towards Singapore's ambitions of becoming a "Smart City".
Mr Mah hails from Batu Pahat in Johor, where he studied before going to university in Melbourne. Now a Singaporean, he discloses that he is "happily married with two sons". Both his boys went to his alma mater, the University of Melbourne and, like him, also graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce. Each spent a couple of years with Deloitte in Melbourne upon graduation, but both didn't stay in the accounting profession.
Now back in Singapore, one son is an investment banker; the other, a budding entrepreneur. Mr Mah himself, on the other hand, has been an accountant all his career. Describing himself as a "true-blue Deloitte person", he joined the firm upon graduation, spending about five years with Deloitte Melbourne before moving to Deloitte Singapore.
In 2007, the year he became CEO of Deloitte Asia Pacific, he was aproached to be a board member at SLA. Two years later, he was appointed deputy chair at the statutory board before being named chair in 2010. "What I enjoy the most about being an accountant," says the 58-year-old, "is being able to advise people. . . and then see them implement my advice and be successful."
"Most of the time, I give good advice," he says. But he's candid enough to cite an instance when his suggestions turned out to be off the mark. Back in the 1980s, he remembers, the US-based president of Starbucks came to Singapore, and was looking to go into China. "I told him 'you're not going to be successful in China because the Chinese are tea drinkers; they don't like coffee'. Guess what? Today, Starbucks open like 1,000 outlets in a year in China. What I forgot was Starbucks don't sell coffee, they sell a lifestyle."
As Mr Mah gets ready to step down from the SLA board at the end of this month, having served two terms of two years each as chairman, he can look back at the satisfaction of having lent a private-sector perspective to a government agency, with advice that counts. "And I have seen them change," he smiles.
CHALY MAH
Chairman, Singapore Land Authority
Chairman, Deloitte Singapore
CEO, Deloitte Asia Pacific
CEO, Deloitte Southeast Asia
Born in 1956 in Batu Pahat, Johor
1977: Bachelor of Commerce, University of Melbourne
1986: NUS-Stanford University Executive Programme
Practising Accountant and Fellow Member of Institute of Singapore Chartered Accountants;
Fellow Member of ACCA
CAREER MILESTONES
1978: Joined Deloitte Melbourne;
1983: Joined Deloitte Singapore
1987: Became Partner of Deloitte Singapore
2002: Became Country Managing Partner of Deloitte Singapore
2002-2009 & 2011 to date: Member of Deloitte Global Board
2006 to date: CEO of Deloitte Southeast Asia
2007 to date: CEO of Deloitte Asia Pacific
2007 to date: Member of Deloitte Global Executive
2010 to date: Chairman of Deloitte Singapore
June 1, 2007: Appointed board member of Singapore Land Authority
August 1, 2009: Appointed Deputy Chairman of Singapore Land Authority
August 1, 2010: Appointed Chairman of Singapore Land Authority
OTHER BOARD PORTFOLIOS
Chairman, Sentosa Leisure Management Pte Ltd
Board Member, Sentosa Development Corporation
Board Member, Singapore International Chamber of Commerce
Board Member, Singapore Institute of Directors
This article was first published on July 19, 2014.
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