The Employment Support Scheme (ESS) Secretariat today published the list of the third batch of employers who have received wage subsidies.

The list covers about 30,000 employers who have received subsidies totalling about $7.7 billion and committed to maintaining a total paid headcount exceeding 330,000.

The ESS Secretariat has also started the disbursement of wage subsidies to the fourth batch of some 11,000 successful employer applicants, with subsidies totalling about $6.3 billion and a total committed headcount of paid employees of about 270,000.

The list of these employers will be published upon completion of the subsidy disbursement. The Secretariat will also disburse the $7,500 one-off subsidy to the fourth batch of about 10,000 self-employed people.

The scheme’s first tranche, which received 168,799 applications from employers and 259,860 from the self-employed, closed on June 14.

The ESS Secretariat and the processing agent have so far completed processing over 100,000 applications from employers, which is 60% of the total applications from employers, involving a total wage subsidy of $25.4 billion and benefitting 1.11 million employees.

A total of about $630 million has been disbursed to 84,000 self-employed people who qualified for the $7,500 one-off subsidy.

The ESS Secretariat and processing agent will continue to process the remaining applications with a view to completing the processing of all eligible applications in mid-July.

Amongst these applications, about 23,000 employers have not provided the supplementary bank and/or Mandatory Provident Fund account information. These cases are being followed up to expedite the vetting process.