I refer to the article “Recommended pay under guidelines for social service sector jobs up by average of 8 per cent: MSF” (April 7).

The National Council of Social Service (NCSS) seems to have left out an important category of employees, the finance and accounting personnel, in the salary guidelines. This category of professionals is critical in the social service or charity sector.

For instance, a qualified accountant safeguards the financial reserves of the charity and holds the charity to the highest standard of accountability over the use of funds and donations.

When there is no such category in the guidelines, the human resources department would probably use the manager/executive benchmark, which might be more administrative in nature and might not fully recognise the specialised and professional nature of the work done by finance and accounting personnel in the charity.

I would therefore like to suggest that NCSS look into having a separate category for these professional employees, and pay them a benchmark that can retain them in the social service sector, which faces competition from other sectors for their skills.

Mary Wong