Under Singapore’s income tax laws, all employers are required to report the yearly Employment Income (IR8A) of their employees to Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS). IRAS is a statutory board under the Ministry of Finance of the Singapore Government that has responsibility to collect Income Tax, Goods and Services Tax, Property Tax, Estate Duty, Betting and Sweepstakes Duties, Stamp Duties and Casino Tax.
The IR8A form must be completed for all employees:
- Full-time resident employee;
- Part-time resident employee;
- Non-resident employee;
- Company director (including a non-resident director);
- Pensioner;
- Employee who has left the organization but was in receipt of income in 2018 (eg. stock options gains)
For the employers, submitting IR8A forms manually is really hard work. Every year, they must deal with laborious task of IR8A paper filing by filling in every single detail on a physical IR8A form. Gathering all of your employees’ information and not to mention consolidate monthly payroll to yearly figures without a software, then checking with the IRAS to make sure there is no errors has been committed. This whole process may take hours to days depending on how many employees and how well in managing employee data.
Auto-Inclusion Scheme
Based on these inconvenience, started from 2009 IRAS come up with the Auto-Inclusion Scheme (AIS). AIS enables employers to prepare and submit their employees’ income information to IRAS electronically and do not need to provide employees with hard copies of forms. AIS is mandatory for company with 10 or more employees or has received the “Notice to File Employment Income of Employees Electronically” gazette under the Income Tax Act.
What Are the Benefits of Using Payroll Software?
Certain payroll software vendors like HRMLabs bring ease of IR8A submission. It also generate reports that are supported with AIS file format (.txt or .xml). Now, gathering all employees’ information including compiling their salary and allowance into yearly figures is as simple as one click away. This streamlines the process as you no longer have to collect and consolidate their salary in manual ways.
HRMLabs consolidates last 12 months’ payroll into the electronic format that is required by IRAS. Then, system will generate a file which is compatible to be uploaded into IRAS portal. This means we are certified by IRAS where our payroll software support the e-Submission of Employment Income.
Lets automate your IR8A submission by request a free demo!
