Site Network: um_bloggers | imagebank | videoworks | business home

Welcome to the official blog of Uncle Ming's Gallery

I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking. (我以為讓愚蠢的人自暴其醜, 正是最大之言論自由所以是最安全的主因)

WOODROW WILSON (編輯組譯)

非官方發佈資料 Unofficial Release

Letter to MPF Scheme Authority

(on the abuse of power of MPF trustee company)

06/5/2010

以下公開三封致積金局信件，為其中一友好公司因應積金受托人公司無理指控而提出之投訴回函，事緣02至08年間，友好公司不斷受積金受托人公司指 控，所為者只因每月未有提交空白報表，香港小企極多為「兄弟班」，僱員亦即僱主，股東都只支年薪，法例上亦無不可，公司虧本，無薪可支亦屬等閒事，積金受托人 公司不因應本地實況改變運作程序，反為莫須有之文件每月指控此類客戶欠供，並向積金管理局正式要求刑事檢控，更有甚者竟有積金受托人公司員工要求客戶為本身內部失誤 導致之錯失繳交罰款，以減省更正麻煩，無視罰款等同承認短供或遲供款項之刑責，小企東主或負責職員，不知就裡，常繳款了事，法例成為此類財閥濫權依據， 敢問是誰之過。

為存私隱忠厚，內容略有刪改，並忍去人物及公司名稱，網友、讀者或同業，如遇同類事情，應據理力爭及向積金局如實投訴，以免蒙不白之冤。

免責條款 DISCLAIMER



Your Ref.:                                             Our Ref.:                                          Date: 02/10/2008

To: Mr. Lee
Senior Inspector
MPF Scheme Authority

Dear Mr Lee,

Re.: False Accusation of Outstanding Mandatory Contribution Based on False Information

I solemnly demand you and your department to take immediate action to stop and blame the XXX  Provident Funds (hereafter called the Provident Funds)  for the harassment to me in performing their duty of MPF service provider.

In the last six years since I used their service, I, as the owner and director of my company, have been accused every month for not paying the MPF contribution to myself. In other words, to put it in a simple way, someone claimed that he was acting on behalf of me to accuse me for not paying myself money. The absurdity of the accusation is self-explanatory.

From the annual summaries (appendix 1), you should understand that all payments were duly paid and tendered annually. And, from the monthly statements from Aug, 2005 to Oct, 2006 (Appendix 2), you can also find that my payment was duly received by them but withheld in the cash account for more than one year for an unclear signature on a fax copy sent by facsimile prior to the original copy sent by courier together with the cheque. Not a penny of interest arrears was paid or a word of sorry for the delay was granted due to their mistake. On the contrary, they make a false accusation of short payment over the issue again after three years without any awareness of their fault instead.

From the series of letters to your department dated 1/8/2002 and 20/8/2007(Appendix 3) , and letters to the Provident Funds dated 25/4/2008 and 23/5/2008, you should be able to find out the ultimate cause for such a ridiculous accusation. All the absurdity stems from the bureaucratic system and arrogance of the management of the Provident Funds. Their malpractice can be summed up as follow:

  1. The management of the Provident Funds has refused to improve their administrative system to suit the practical and reasonable need of customers in the environment of Hong Kong. From time to time, their staff attribute the inflexibility and failure to their stupid computer system. It seems to me that their computer system is designed to be served by their customer but not intended for serving their customer. “Means” and “ends” were reversed.
  2. They value a “nil” monthly return more than the time and effort of their customer or even the conservation of environment. Actually they get lost in the original purpose of documentation. In the absence of any sound reason or legal requirement, they cannot tell how eleven nil returns plus a normal monthly return is better than an annual return in all senses.
  3. It seems that their processing system has never provided any remedial measure for contingency even the error is cause by their staff. Whenever there was any mistake due to their fault, they refused to admit. Some of their staff even tried to persuade their customer to confess the false guilt (eg. short payment or late payment of MPF contribution and) and pay the “small amount” of surcharge for “simplifying” the adjustment procedure. In their mind, the innocence of their customer is less important than the unreal “integrity” or “reputation” of their stupid computer system.
  4. They treat their customers as “object” rather than “mankind”. Nobody, including the agent, is directly accountable to the management of a customer's account in the way as an account executive. Every time when I made any complain about their allegation, I must told the whole story from the very beginning again to a stranger on the hot line but the mistake remained unadjusted and the accusation persisted for a certain long period of time or simply no adjustment was seen to be made like the captioned issue. In December, 2007, I instructed another MPF service provider to prepare the document for the transfer my MPF scheme to the new trustee from the Provident Funds. However, they hindered the transfer once and again by accusing me as the employer of a series of offenses one by one in the the last three seasons on the one hand. On the other hand, their “clever” computer system issued letters persuading me as the employee to keep using their service. I was dissected into two different entities by their "clever "computer. Obviously, their “clever and stupid” computer has never been alert that the employer and employee were the same person.

My case is not an isolated or independent issue. Another associated companies encountered the same false accusation from the Provident Funds. We are really disappointed by the corporate behavior of this company.

It is deemed that the government should also be liable for the abuse of power of these MPF trustee companies. All the ordinance was made under the influence of lobbiers of these trustee companies on the assumption that they were all faultless, ethical, reliable, responsible and trust worthy. There is no statutory mechanism to check their behavior so that they could bully their customers for high sounding reasons and in the name of law. I can foresee that more allegations will follow when the 30-day settlement period is reduced to 10 days. Our bitter experience tells us that these gigantic corporations and their senior staff have never been willing to admit their mistake. The excessive document processing time or failure in their bureaucratic system will be interpreted as the guilt of late payment or non-payment of employer.

In my impression, your department was established to check the behavior of employers but not the MPF trustee companies. Should I say that this is an institutional defect of the MPF project which was created from the view of insurance companies? I hope you would reflect our views to the top government officials. If our grievances is not properly addressed, the community's negative passion against gigantic corporations will be reinforced.

Yours sincerely,



Enclosed:
Appendix 1 MPF Annual Summaries,
Appendix 2 MPF Monthly Statements,
Appendix 3: Letters to Your Department,
Appendix 4: Letters to the Provident Funds

Appendix 3.1

Your Ref.:                            Our Ref.:                                    Date: 20/8/2007
To:     Mr. Chan
          Senior Inspector
          MPF Scheme Authority 

Re.: Allegation of Outstanding Mandatory Contribution Based on False Information

Dear Mr Chan,

I felt extremely angry for the ridiculous allegation of the MPF contribution surcharge based solely on the incomplete and unilateral information from the "XXX Provident Funds"(hereafter called the Provident Funds). Since the establishment of our company, I receive the "annual"director fee upon my discretionary decision without the objection of other 2 directors every year during the period from August to October every year. The process is a ritual, nominal and accounting formality rather than an actual transfer of money from one entity to another. In a previous letter dated Aug 2, 2002 followed by a few telephone conversations in the consecutive years, I had explained thoroughly to you or your colleagues. All this happened because of the following reasons:

  1. The Provident Funds refused to accept prior or advanced MPF return of any kind for one whole year. They insisted that separate and timely null returns for the remaining eleven months without any payment made were critical to their "computer system". So every month the computer "assumed" that I, as the representative of my employer did not pay myself, as the employee of my company, remuneration if they did not received a null return for the month in question.  Moreover, this stupid computer system would inform your department their "bold" hypothesis as factual evidence.
  2. Every year when the Provident Funds received the payment and MPF return, including the last 11 null returns for the last 12 months in one single sheet, their stupid computer system did not take remedial action to amend their previous false information sent to your department.

Even a junior programmer knows well that a sound computer system should allow certain kinds of contingency or human mistakes amid the data input process by incorporating into the program an internal error handling mechanism. All computers only work in accordance with the instructions and criteria set by the system designer. I could not find any good reason for the Provident Funds to enforce such a stupid system which was inhuman and inconvenient to their customers in the light that a lot of their competitors have a smarter computer system being able to accept annual return instead of monthly return for SMEs like ours. What they have done was harassing their customers by abusing the MPF Ordinance and wasting the government resources to conduct meaningless investigation. I also felt regretted to see the Government has never pushed the gigantic corporation to improve their services by rationalizing their administration but presses SMEs' owners to waste their time and manpower to satisfy a group of document or red tape addicts. A lot of SMEs are sharing the same bitter experience as ours but find no way to address their grievances. If this charge establishes, it means that some people were empowered by the law to act on behalf of a person to allege himself for not paying himself money. Was the law made for serving this absurd purpose?

We are fierce because of the logic and philosophy behind the system as well as the law which was made in the absence of discretion and consideration in practical situation. In reality, a lot of SMEs' owners are self-employed. In the last ten years, without any privilege, all SMEs have been working hard to strive for survival under the ever changing legal framework and business environment in disfavour of SMEs. In addition to the MPF ordinance, we must put multiple effort in the daily operation for complying with the new laws like labour ordinance, copyright ordinance, privacy ordinance, environmental protection ordinance, etc.  For most  of the time in the last decade, our three collaborating firms have been running in deficit unless we did not  take any salary.

The worst of all is that some privileged people are taking advantages from or exercising their own will over ordinary people by abusing these ordinances. Their "unjust" but "seem-to-be-legal" activities have given rise to the grave grievance among people from lower and middle class which have eventually fueled energy to certain social movements harming the stability of society. In the last five years, though we did not borrow any money from loan shark, we were threatened by debt collector employed by the creditor of our domestic helper because it was "legal" for a finance company to lend huge sum of money to a domestic helper regardless of her ability to repay and then it was "legal" for them to force her employer to repay for her debt trickily by sending debt collectors to harass his family. We also fought against  a group of professional crocks working closely with law professionals who abused the copyright ordinance for money claim with false evidences while the police could only suppress their activities but failed to convicted these criminals guilty in the court room. Now when we were still busy filtering the malicious and illicit frauds or probings intended for legal blackmail away from genuine inquiries and spending extra time to verify the authenticity of orders placed by customers to avoid being trapped again by the frivolous litigator, your department told us that we violated the MPF ordinance because the computer system of the Provident Funds was being unhappy to go without a null return to be fed at the right time every month. We would like to ask the government and the law makers for whom all these laws are made. Why this case was not treated as a false information from a defective data management system of a MPF service provider according to our information? Why our complaint and declaration were ignored but their misinformation was accepted as evidence.  Should it be the time for the top government officials and law makers to put a full stop to the “over-making of law” until a serious review of and corresponding remedies to the abuse of all these ordinances has been worked out.

We knew that their staff working in the frontier have kept reflecting our opinions to the management while the policy persisted without any change. We also knew that you had tried to reconcile the conflict in the past few years. For our peace of mind, we will transfer our MPF plan to another company.

Regards,

Yours sincerely

Appendix 3.2

Your Ref.:                            Our Ref.:                                    Date: 2/8/2002

Mr. R. Lai
Senior Manager
Member Protection Department
Manadatory Provident Fund Schemes Authority

Dear Mr R. LAI

In response to your notice dated 30.7.2002, I would like to inform you that there is no outstanding Manadatory Provident Fund Contributions and Surcharge for the captioned period as no income should be reported untile the end of financial year. I am both the representative of the employer and also the  employee receiving director fee from the company on yearly basis. I do not understand why the XXX Provident Funds  provided your department the information beause I supposed they should have been informed of the payment period.

I contacted the Provident Funds and asked them to take remedial measure to correct their record in the morning today.

If you still have any queries, please feel free to contact me on 23349800 during office hours.

Thank you very much for your attention and consideration.

Yours faithfully

NOTICE

- 10/1/2009 -

As our web hosting service provider had upgraded their server recently, the speed and stability of <http://blog.um-gallery.com> was much improved. Now it is operated simultaneously with <http://blog.um-gallery.net>. To share with our views as a member of SMEs, just click either url as  shown above.

由於網站伺服器已獲提升,原明心齋博客網誌之網站<http://blog.um-gallery.com> 連接速度及穩定性均大幅改善, 與另一並行網站<http://blog.um-gallery.net> 同時運作, 點 擊上面之超連結進入我們博客的內心世界, 分享他們作為中小企成員的感受和意見.

temporal law