About 2,300 of the city's 7 million MPF accounts have been wrongly topped up with a government handout of HK$6,000 aimed at low- income people.
Disclosing this yesterday, the Mandatory Provident Fund Schemes Authority did not rule out the possibility that more cases of money being paid into the accounts of people earning more than HK$10,000 a month would be discovered.
Authority chief operating officer Hendena Yu Hoi-ping said the authority was empowered by law to withdraw the mistaken payments.
But she said none of the erroneous payments had been withdrawn yet as the authority had to write to the people involved first.
Early next month, Civic Party lawmaker Ronny Tong Ka-wah will request that the authority tell the Legislative Council's panel on financial affairs about the time and manpower required to retrieve the wrong payments.
Finance chief John Tsang Chun-wah announced a one-off giveaway in his maiden budget last year, saying that the government would put HK$9 billion into the pension accounts of about 1.4 million workers whose monthly income was less than HK$10,000.