Nearly 70 per cent of the 250,000 applicants who were initially rejected from the government’s consumption voucher scheme last year have received HK$5,000 handouts after appealing the decision to exclude them.
In a written response to an enquiry from lawmaker Dominic Lee, the Permanent Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury Cathy Chu revealed that a total of 250,000 people were initially disqualified from the scheme for having permanently departed from Hong Kong or having intended to do so.
The condition that Hongkongers who had emigrated or planned to emigrate were not eligible for the government handouts, designed to boost the city’s Covid-stricken economy, was added to the second phase of 2022’s voucher handouts.
As of the end of February, Chu said around 170,000 of the 180,000-odd applicants who had filed for a review had been successful and received the HK$5,000 e-coupon.
Chu also said that the administrative cost of last year’s handout scheme amounted to about HK$400 million, a quarter of which went on service fees for electronic payment service providers.
During a Legislative Council meeting on Wednesday, the legislator asked why only around 80,000 applicants were rejected when government data suggested that 110,000 people had left the city from mid-2021 to mid-2022.
“Do we have any effective measures to prevent those who have already emigrated – left Hong Kong, and who no longer want to be one of us Hongkongers – from using taxpayers’ money and receiving consumption vouchers?” Lee asked.
In response, the Head of the Financial Secretary’s Private Office Howard Lee said the government had already saved over HK$400 million by disqualifying the 80,000.
The official said the main criteria to determine the eligibility of applicants included whether they had applied to retrieve their Mandatory Provident Fund early on the grounds of permanent departure, if they had stayed in Hong Kong for at least one day in the past 36 months, and the place of issue of their Hong Kong Identity Cards.
The finance minister added that they had reviewed the evidence submitted by those who had appealed and found that some had returned to Hong Kong after emigration or had never actually left the city.
When the government started to take appeals over the handout rejections last July, an applicant told HKFP that the authorities should have checked residents’ travel records rather than asking them to file reviews.
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