The Employment Support Scheme (ESS) Secretariat today announced that the fifth batch of wage subsidies totalling $4.2 billion and covering more than 190,000 employees will be disbursed.

This latest batch of about 9,000 employer applicants will be notified within this week and receive subsidies early next week.

The fifth batch of employers will receive an average wage subsidy of about $460,000, which is higher than the average subsidy of $214,000 for the first three batches of approved employers but lower than the average subsidy of $565,000 for the fourth batch.

The Government explained that 4% of the fifth batch of employers are large-scale enterprises with 50 or more employees.

About 2,000 self-employed people will receive a one-off lump sum subsidy of $7,500 early next week, involving a total wage subsidy about $15 million.

Together with the first four batches of wage subsidies that have been disbursed, the wage subsidies in all five batches amount to about $29.6 billion, covering nearly 110,000 employers and more than 1.3 million employees.

About 86,000 self-employed people in the five batches have or will receive a one-off subsidy of $7,500, involving about $650 million in total.

After excluding the ineligible applications, the ESS Secretariat is processing some remaining 49,000 applications from employers and 18,000 applications from self-employed people, with a view to completing the processing in mid-July.

Among these applications, about 23,000 employers have not yet provided the supplementary bank or MPF account information. The secretariat and processing agent are following up on the cases.

Among the employers with approved wage subsidies in the third batch, there are around 150 whose headcount in March was reduced to zero.

Since these employers have provided an undertaking to spend all the wage subsidies on paying wages to employees, they have to rehire staff and use all the wage subsidies received to pay the wages of employees from June to August and make contributions to their MPF accounts. Otherwise, the Government will claw back the unspent balance of the subsidies.

The Government stressed that assisting employers, by providing wage subsidies to re-employ employees who have been dismissed or pay wages to employees who have been put on no-pay leave, is consistent with the principles underpinning the scheme.

The Government added that the processing agent will pay special attention to employers with zero committed headcount and may conduct on-site checking when processing their applications or after disbursing wage subsidies.