Official death-reporting checklist
Immigration reporting is a direct duty, stated plainly on the FDH page, with no timeframe attached to it. Alongside that official duty, the model service contract adds its own reporting and cost-bearing terms, and a PERKESO claim runs on a separate track again — the honest starting point is that these are several distinct threads to coordinate, not one single process.
- Confirm any urgent medical or police instructions first, before other coordination.
- Keep one log for every call, document, and expense across all threads.
- Route body-repatriation questions through the country representative’s own confirmed process where one exists.
What Immigration and the Labour Department each expect
Immigration’s FDH page states directly, among its list of employer obligations: "the employer is responsible for reporting to the Immigration Department if the FDH... is deceased." No day-count deadline is given anywhere on that page for this specific duty, unlike some of the other processes it covers.
The JTKSM/ILO employer guide’s sample service contract — a model contract term reflecting the government-brokered MOU, not a standalone statute — separately states the employer must report to the nearest Labour Department for any injury or death of the domestic worker. These are two different bodies with what the sourced material presents as two separate reporting duties, not one combined step.
Funeral and repatriation costs, and the PERKESO side
The same sample contract states that funeral and body-repatriation costs are to be managed and borne by the employer — again a model contract clause, worth treating as strongly indicative of the actual MOU-brokered contract terms rather than a general legal principle stated elsewhere.
Separately, PERKESO’s dependants’/funeral benefit claim needs a death certificate or burial permit, a funeral-expense receipt, and proof of relationship to dependants graded by who survives. Whether the 30-day reporting window that applies to accident and disaster notices also covers a non-accident, natural death specifically isn’t confirmed — the claim form’s own logic ties its accident-timeline fields to whether the death is accident-related, which this research didn’t find resolved either way.
The embassy side, and what’s confirmed for Indonesia specifically
For an Indonesian domestic helper, the Indonesian Embassy in Kuala Lumpur publishes its own burial-permit and body-repatriation process directly: a licensed corpse-transport company applies for the "Surat Penghantaran Jenazah" on behalf of the family or employer, using the deceased’s Indonesian passport or ID, an application letter from that transport company, the Malaysian death certificate, the hospital burial permit, and Ministry of Health clearance for sending the body abroad. The embassy states this can be completed quickly, and that it’s free.
An equivalent confirmed process for other nationalities represented in this cluster wasn’t located in this research — general guidance exists for some, but not specific to their Malaysia-based mission, so it isn’t stated here as settled. Confirm directly with the relevant embassy or consulate.