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Enoch Yiu

The Mandatory Provident Schemes Authority (MPFA) has begun forwarding non-compliance pension cases to the Department of Justice and police for prosecution.

An MPFA official said 12 employers who had failed to set up pension plans for staff, faced a maximum penalty of six months jail and a HK$100,000 fine.

The employers had ignored repeated MPFA warnings to set up pension plans.

Analysts said more prosecutions could be on the way, as there were still many employers without MPF plans.

At the end of last week, about 49,000 employers did not have pension plans for staff, the MPFA said.

The MPF, launched on December 1, required 251,100 companies that had yet to set up staff pension plans at that time to do so. The companies together employ about two million people.

Rex Auyeung, chief executive of Principal International Asia, a government approved MPF provider, said the MPF was still a new concept and many employers were reluctant to take out plans.

'The Government and the industry need to educate people about the benefits of the MPF,' he said.

The MPFA has set up a 60-member inspection team to trace non-compliance and to follow up staff complaints of not having access to MPF.

Chairman Charles Lee Yeh-kwong said one of the major tasks of the MPFA was to ensure compliance of the legislation and so enforcement formed an integral part of its core function.

As of the end of last week, the MPFA said, there were 202,000 employers with MPF. They represented 82 per cent of those obliged to set up pension schemes.

Those companies had a combined 1.65 million employees, representing 91 per cent of the employees who had to join the MPF.

In addition, there were 279,000 self-employed people with MPF schemes, representing 93 per cent of all self-employed people.

In all 82 per cent of Hong Kong's three million employees were covered by retirement plans.



MPFA acts against shirkers