Almost half the employers with AIA Pension and Trustee's Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF) scheme will miss the February 10 deadline for the first payment of contributions, according to managing director Desmond Chan Kwok-kit. Of the employers that use AIA, Mr Chan said: 'We believe that we will probably get more than 50 per cent of those companies . . . before the deadline this Saturday.' Firms which miss the deadline are expected to only do so by a few days. 'Quite a number of employers will miss that deadline but I believe most of them will not miss it by too much.' The Mandatory Provident Fund Schemes Authority is expected to take a lenient approach to companies which miss the deadline by a few days as this is the first payment. The most common teething problem has been employers deducting the full month of December's contribution from their employees. Staff are only meant to start paying from the last day of December but employers start their contributions from December 1. 'Under the law they only have to deduct from December 31 [for employees],' said Mr Chan. Under the MPF, employees must contribute a portion of their salary to the scheme to help finance their retirement. Employers must also make an additional contribution. Clients who use AIA's electronic system of calculating their MPF contributions would be less likely to miss the deadline than those using manual methods. A survey of employees in AIA's MPF last month found that about 65 per cent chose funds with some equity and the remainder chose lower risk investments including fixed income and money markets.