You love 'em or you hate 'em. And to judge by an enormous mailbag from last week, you hate the Bermuda pension.

"It's a depressing subject," one correspondent said, of a subject that, if you think about it, ought to fill you with joy.

I must deal with this subject again, right now, because another correspondent has raised a can of worms that I cannot recall seeing addressed in detail anywhere else.

He writes: "I am a foreign worker, working in Bermuda for the last five years. I have no knowledge if the social insurance payments deducted from my pay cheque are being deposited to the Department or not. And of course, I won't be working in Bermuda until I am 65 years old. So how do I benefit from this pension scheme?"

The answer is: he won't benefit. To qualify for a Bermuda pension, a worker must make a minimum of 950 weekly contributions during his or her lifetime. Anything less, and zero pension accrues. That's 18-plus years of contributions. Only small payments are allowed to make up for any deficit (see below).

The best my correspondent will be able to do is to seek repayment of all his contributions, without interest or the employer's portion, when he reaches 65 years of age.

The potential good news is that, if his employer is deducting five percent of salary for the legally-mandated new pension, and matching it, and paying the result into an approved private pension plan, then the writer will be able to take his new private pension plan with him when he leaves Bermuda. My correspondent should ask his employer what the situation is regarding his government "pension" and the new private pension.

Sorry to be the bearer of that news, but what light it shines in all manner of directions. For a start: how many expatriates, on reaching 65, will remember to contact the Social Insurance Department (www.sociainsurance.gov.bm), telephone 295-5151 extension 1117)? And how many of them will succeed in obtaining their refund?

On another, bigger point: Government collects almost $20 million a year from employees who will never receive a pension of any kind.

Even if the money were eventually refunded, this represents a tax on expatriates and those Bermudians who work for less than 18 years in Bermuda. The latter must be a smaller group, and they have been excluded from the following calculations, just as they are excluded from the pension benefits.

Bermuda has about 8,000 foreign workers. Under current rules, only key employees will make it past nine years. Let's say there are 500 such key employees. Not all of them will work in Bermuda for 18 years, but let's say they do. That leaves 7,500 expats paying $25.34 a week each for "pensions", with employers matching that amount. That would produce $19.765 million in the next year in expatriate "pension contributions". At the very least, Government will have the use of this money for decades, even if it were eventually reclaimed. Most of it won't be. The hotel occupancy tax is forecast to raise less than half that much.

If these "contributions" were called "tax payments", that would be fair enough, but dressing them up as "pensions" or "social insurance" is misleading.

Add it to the payroll tax, and for the average employee, you're looking at an income tax ? sorry, a "payroll tax" ? of 20 percent or more.

Expats, of course, may opt out of the new private pension plan. To make life easier for Bermudian employers, Government thus offers expats a chance not to have a private pension, either. (I assume the argument would be that they are so rich, they won't need pensions, which is wrong in most cases.) Like so many well-meant Government initiatives, this policy is subject to the law of unintended consequences. It has the unfortunate effect of making expats cheaper ? at least in this regard ? to employ than Bermudians.

Another correspondent wrote to point out that the Government employees' pension scheme is under-funded by something like half a billion dollars, which surprised me. That would be a recent development, since it used to be the case that the Government employees were advantaged not only in the quality of their pension, but also the funding.

Why Government employees should receive beneficial treatment always escaped me, in the same way that I never understood why they were eligible for medals for doing their jobs. While I can't say I'm happy that thousands of government employees may get treated as badly as the rest of us in regard to the pensions business, it does seem only fair. We are all in the same boat, the S.S. . Why should only some of us qualify for a seat in the lifeboat if the ship founders?

Another correspondent wrote of "three instances whereby the Government gains and the pensioner loses". These are:

1. The formula for calculating the percentage of pension due to the beneficiary upon retirement is inequitable in this regard: people having less than two years' contributions missing from a paid-in period between 1969 (inception of scheme) and 2001 (age 65) lose more than ten percent of the total pension. But they were only short approximately 5.64 percent of their contributions, not ten percent. The pensioner receives $881.46 of a possible $1,001.95.

2. Pensioners cannot repay contributions that are missing, except for the year prior to the current year.

3. For pensioners (above 65) who still work, the amount contributed by their employers is paid to the Government but is not paid to the pensioners until they cease working entirely. In Bermuda, many pensioners are property-rich and cash-poor and may well find it necessary to work part-time indefinitely and therefore never collect these amounts from Government.

The first two points probably have something to do with actuarial expectations and so forth. On point (1), longer-lived policies out-earn at a faster rate, because of compounding. Point (2) is more interesting. Government's argument would be that unpaid contributions have not been in the theoretical kitty long enough to have earned enough interest to carry their weight and so late contributions cannot be tolerated.

That would be a really good line to take, except that Bermuda has a pay-as-you go system, so it doesn't matter how long the money has been in the fund, because it has never been in the fund. Until recently, it was spent during the year it was paid in.

The third point, however, is as outrageous as the expatriate business.

And then Robert Stewart wrote. Mr. Politically Incorrect recently enraged a portion of the community by pointing out in a closely-argued manner what a waste of time the Sustainable Development initiative is.

I happen to think that Mr. Stewart didn't begin to go far enough in denouncing that inherently futile and expensive pork barrel exercise, but before I too receive hate editorials, let's move back to pensions.

Mr. Stewart wrote to recount some of the difficulties he has experienced in obtaining a copy of the Government's latest actuarial report on the pension plan, which he describes as "little short of a Ponzi scheme".

Ponzi was a master crook who encouraged "investors" with promises of absurdly high interest rates. When he'd spent those "investments", he garnered some more, to pay off the promised "interest" to the first crew of investors, whose entire investment was already gone. He kept borrowing from a bunch of gullible Peters to pay a bunch of gullible Pauls until even after it all collapsed.

Mr. Stewart has been hot on the trail of the actuary's triennial report on the pension plan. He has more fortitude than I do.

After several weeks of getting nowhere on the subject a few years ago, I gave up. But now comes news that the report for 2002 is to be tabled in the House of Assembly later this year.

The report's 1999, 1996 and 1993 predecessors were never made public. Here's how stuff like that works: reports are not made public because they would make unpleasant reading for someone.

If the 2002 report is issued, it will probably make the novel "Frankenstein" look like a charming fairy tale in which everyone lives happily ever after. Such a fate does not await everyone who pays in to the Bermuda pension scheme.

If our Ombudsman were short of something to do, she would do well to start on the pension scheme.

One final point: Bermuda is routinely hammered in the outside world for its lack of taxes. Yet we have a payroll tax, a "pension" tax, a separate pension that operates as a tax on employers, vehicle taxes, property taxes, Customs duties, hotel levies ? you name a tax, we've got it. So Bermudians get the worst of both worlds: hated for not having taxes, and yet paying taxes out of their ears. Huh?