BERMUDA Industrial Union president Chris Furbert said stricter punishments should be meted out to companies that fail to pay their pension contributions.

Mr. Furbert said some of his members had discovered the hard way that their employers had not been paying their share of contributions when they reached retirement age and did not receive the benefits they had thought they would be entitled to.

"These companies are taking the money out of their employees' pay cheques but they're not turning it over to the authorities, as they're supposed to do," Mr. Furbert said yesterday.

"I have just been in talks with the Labour Advisory Council and this subject came up and we were discussing how there should be stricter penalties against companies doing this kind of thing."

Employees could see that the deductions were being made from their wages, but they had no way of knowing for sure whether the pension contributions were actually being paid by the company into the Government's public pension fund, he added.

"If you're a worker of retirement age and your company hasn't paid your pension contributions for five or seven years, you don't know it's happening.

"You trust that these employers are doing the right thing, but some of them are taking that money and using it for other things."

Mr. Furbert's comments came after Auditor General Larry Dennis produced a list of 39 employers who each owed more than $40,000 in pension contributions in July 2005. The combined total of unpaid contributions of these 39 companies alone was $2.3 million.