Thursday, November 1, 2012

Money Never Enough for MIW

Inflation is already a prominent feature in S'pore. It is on the raise and yet our cost of living if further burden by so many increases in fee by all the various govt. extractive institutions under MIW. No wonder our productivity is on the declines for years. At the 1st sign of rising administrative cost, they pass the bucket to us instead of looking into ways to reduce it and do the work more effectively. What is infuriating is that they are making good profit.  They are using increase in cost as an excuse to suck more money from us.

Some examples of these greedy extractive organisations are :

1) Town Councils under PAP wards increased the Service / Conservancy Charges in various HDB estates. We know for a fact that Town Councils have so much excess revenue that a large portion goes to their sinking fund every year. They have blemished record of losing this sinking fund in the past by gambling it away in risky investment products. Till today, there is no accountability to this episode. It is from this incident that we came to know they have collected more than is needed. Now they have to be more transparent due to public outcry. After the money losing incident, Town Councils have to declare their yearly financial statement. This confirms our suspicious that they are charging higher fee than is needed to cover the estate maintenance administration expenses.

2) HDB Refuse collection charges up also went up recently. The excuse this time is it is due to collection of recycle materials. We support environmental policy and end up paying for it. Recycle materials are sold to recycle company. So where does this money goes to ? Town Council or HDB ? Why is this money not use to offset our refuse collection fee ? Should not our fee go down instead ? After all we have been recycling materials for years. Previously we have 3 recycle bins for segregation of  materials. Now we have only one recycle bin. So the cost of collection should go down instead of up as it is easier to gather up 1 bin instead of 3.

3) CPF  Medishield - From 2001 and 2010, MediShield collected $2.11 billion in premiums and paid out only $1.26 billion in claims. So they collected $850 million more than they paid out. This is no surprise as all of us know the likelihood of making a claim is slim since the deductible is sky high.Yet they are still increasing not only the premiums, but again jack up the deductible.

Is there any good solid reason for all these increase in fees ?  The answer is an obvious NO !

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