Where does the funding for the Employees Retraining Board come from?
The Employees Retraining Fund provides funding for the expenditure incurred by the Employees Retraining Board’s Manpower Development Scheme. The Fund was set up in 1992 with a government grant of $300 million. Until 2001, a total of $1.6 billion was injected into the Fund to develop the Scheme. From the financial year of 2001-02 to 2007-08, the government had provided the Board with recurrent funding of about $400 million a year. Part of the Board’s revenue also comes from charges levied on employers who hire workers from outside Hong Kong at the rate of $400 a month for each foreign worker, to be collected by the Immigration Department. And from October 1, 2003, the levy also extended to cover employers of foreign domestic helpers.
