***************************************
Following is the transcript of remarks by the Secretary for Labour and Welfare, Mr Matthew Cheung Kin-chung, and the Director of Social Welfare, Mr Patrick Nip, after attending a radio programme this morning (October 10):
Reporter: You say that this plan aims at helping the poor. Would there be additional measures ... like random checks? What will you do to help convince the legislators to support your proposal?
Secretary for Labour and Welfare: First of all, I am doing my very best to lobby all legislators including political parties, to impress on them the merits of this proposal and the urgency for approval by the Finance Committee because a lot of elders are waiting for the allowance. In fact, we reckon that at least 400 000 senior citizens will benefit, with 290 000 of them certainly will stand to benefit through the auto-conversion process. In devising the whole programme, our objective is to facilitate, and to make things easy for the eligible elders to apply and to get the allowance as quickly as possible. So, facilitation and simplicity underline the whole programme. At the same time, we will be prudent. We will provide safeguards to guard against abuse as well. So we strike a balance here.
Reporter: Would you step up measures to prevent abuse?
Secretary for Labour and Welfare: Certainly, there will be a safeguard mechanism in place. The Director of Social Welfare is here, so let me invite him to say a few words.
Director of Social Welfare: As the Secretary said, we need to maintain a balance. On the one hand, we want to give the eligible elders the necessary support as early as possible, we want to make our whole process as simple as possible. At the same time, as the amount of public expenditure involved is very substantial, we need to have the necessary safeguard mechanism. So basically it is a declaration of income and assets system but we also have a random check mechanism in place. For those selected for random checks, we would conduct interviews and look into relevant documents. In addition, we would also do a data matching process with other relevant departments, for example on properties. So we would certainly have this safeguard mechanism in place to strike the right balance.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)
Ends/Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Issued at HKT 15:20
NNNN
