How About A Committee On CPF Returns?

Source : The Business Times, September 25, 2007

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

I refer to the article, 'Longevity Insurance committee may report in 6 months' (BT, Sept 21), and the debate in Parliament on CPF returns. In reply to a question by opposition MP Low Thia Khiang (Hougang) on whether the GIC uses funds from the CPF funds to invest, Dr Ng said: 'The answer is no.'

Using a banking analogy, Dr Ng said: 'You put money in a bank and you agree that you put it there and you get 2 per cent. The bank publishes a report and says of all its earnings, it earned 8 per cent. You go to the bank and say, 'I want 8 per cent'. It doesn't work.'

He said that the government bears the liabilities in the same way the bank does. 'The Ministry of Finance has taken our liabilities. What the Ministry of Finance does with its money is (its) consideration. But . . . the CPF Board . . . promises a risk-free rate to (CPF) members. And that is how it works.'

The analogy used may not be very appropriate, because the bank's customers and shareholders are two different groups of people, who in many ways are on different sides. In contrast, for CPF members and the (ultimate) shareholders of Temasek, they are the same, the citizens of Singapore. We are all on the same side.

If Temasek (or GIC) do not use CPF funds to invest, where do CPF funds go to, since the budget is in surplus for most years?

Also, unlike the bank analogy, Singaporeans are not asking for the entire 8 per cent - just some of it to enable more of us to retire with enough money.

Since a committee on Longevity Insurance has been formed, why not also form a committee on CPF returns, or have the same committee study CPF returns too. We should be studying the causes of the problem, instead of just the solutions to the problem of Singaporeans not having enough CPF to retire on.

Leong Sze Hian,
Singapore