The Finance Ministry through the Royal Malaysian Customs Department is committed to ensuring that the Goods and Services Tax (GST) refund to taxpayers will be expedited, and payment to be made beginning June 22. Minister Tengku Datuk Seri Zafrul Abdul Aziz said the payment process would be completed by December this year.

Education has been severely disrupted due to the pandemic, but this accelerated the adoption of digital learning with teachers using technology to engage with students at home. To help with this effort, the Ministry of Education has collaborated with tech giants Google, Microsoft and Apple to revamp its year-old digital learning platform DELIMa. The platform is said to offer applications and services to teachers and students for digital learning.

The COVID-19 epidemic and the Movement Control Order have forced us all to adapt to a new way of working. AMCHAM would like to hear from you. How is your organization adjusting to the new normal, what are your recommended practices? Please share with us your best 'return to work' practices as we would like to have this information for other members on our website. For more information please contact Yvonne Miranda, our Membership & Engagement Manager at yvonne@amcham.com.my

There has been a lot of discussion around the impact technology and AI will have for the future of work, and yet, ever since Covid-19 swept the globe, the message about our future has become even clearer: what started as a few weeks of working from home has evolved into a catalyst for change regarding how we work and live. Over 16 million US workers have transitioned to working from home, a new category of careers has been born under the title “essential workers,” and the average American has now begun to stream online content for 8 hours or more each day.

In just three weeks, more than 16 million Americans have lost their jobs, and before the coronavirus pandemic fades, many millions more will become unemployed. And that leaves many with only one critical tool to recover their career: networking. To be sure, the normal routes we used—in-person meetings or coffees and networking events—have vanished. Here’s a sobering stat: until COVID-19, event planners were putting together more than 5,200 meetings a day, each with more than 10 attendees.

As the coronavirus pandemic takes its terrible toll, in both human life and livelihoods, governments, public-health authorities, companies, and individuals have responded with extraordinary measures. To protect the health of people, governments and institutions put in place restrictions on movement and mechanisms for health tracking and reporting. These mechanisms, including contact-tracing and self-reporting apps, some recording and transmitting personal health information, underscore the deepening importance of data protection and privacy in this crisis.