When you leave your work place and transfer to another employer, should the visa transfer processing fees be shouldered by the employee or the employer? A friend of mine is seeing some salary deductions by his current company, which says the deductions include the “visa transfer fee” of KD 60.

He has been working with the current employer for almost 10 months now and still having KD 12 deducted monthly (total of KD 108 already) + some other deductions about which he doesn’t know from his salary.

I advised him to ask for a copy of his pay slip to track this deduction, but his superior told him that they don’t issue salary slips as this is not required by the company and it is not written in the Kuwait Labor Law as well.

In this case how will he be able to keep track of his compensation/ deduction? Is it really not required in all the companies in Kuwait to issue a monthly pay slip?

Name withheld Answer: The company is not required to give you a monthly pay slip, although a lot of good companies do regardless of this fact, but your company is required to give you all the details of the deductions from your salary.

Before we go on, we would like to clarify that all the fees of the transfer fees plus the residence fees (including the health insurance) are required to be paid by the company hiring you and not the employee.

Unfortunately, this is not the case in a lot of companies and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor has failed miserably to ensure that the expatriates don’t suffer in this regard.

A lot of good companies, however, pay all these fees regardless of the length of service of their employees.

Coming back to the deduction issue, go to your Accounts Department and request for the deduction details. You have the right to know about all the deductions from your pay.