AIS by 1 March. The employer’s tax deadline.
Most directors know their own personal tax is due in April. Fewer realise the company has a personal-tax deadline before that: 1 March, when employers under the Auto-Inclusion Scheme must submit every employee’s income to IRAS. Miss it and your staff’s returns show up empty or wrong, and IRAS comes looking for the employer, not the employee.
In this article
What AIS is
Under AIS, the employer sends IRAS each employee’s employment income for the year electronically. IRAS then pre-fills that income in the employee’s personal return, so the employee just checks and files. The employer stops issuing paper Form IR8A for those staff to submit themselves. It’s convenient for employees and it shifts the accuracy burden squarely onto the employer’s payroll.
Who has to join
AIS is compulsory once an employer has a certain number of employees; below that it’s voluntary but encouraged. The headcount threshold is IRAS’s and has come down over the years, so check it against your current staff count each year rather than assuming. Once you’re in, you stay in. And "employees" includes directors drawing a salary or a fee, part-timers and anyone else the company paid employment income to — not just the full-time team.
What gets submitted
Salary, bonuses, allowances, director’s fees, benefits-in-kind, share awards, and the details of any staff who left during the year. Benefits-in-kind are the usual gap: housing, a company car, club memberships and similar perks have to be valued and reported, and the values come from IRAS’s prescribed methods. Employer CPF is not employee income, but employee CPF appears as a deduction line. If your payroll records are monthly and accurate, AIS is an export. If they’re a year-end reconstruction, it’s a project.
Director’s fees again: fees approved at the AGM are reported for the year they’re approved. If the resolution isn’t signed by year-end, the fee isn’t in that year’s AIS.
How to prepare
Register with IRAS for AIS before the year you intend to submit — there’s a sign-up window and you can’t submit for a year you weren’t registered for. Make sure your payroll software or your payroll provider can produce the IRAS file formats. Reconcile total salary in the accounts against total salary in payroll before submitting; a mismatch is the first thing IRAS queries. And give employees their own copy of what was submitted, so nobody discovers a wrong figure inside their tax return.
What happens if it’s late
Late or missing AIS submissions are an employer offence with penalties attached, and the practical fallout is worse than the fine: employees file with missing income, IRAS re-assesses them, and they blame you. We fold AIS into the corporate-secretary calendar for exactly this reason. Four of the six dates on that calendar aren’t strictly the secretary’s job, and this is one of them. We chase it anyway.
Not sure if you’re over the AIS line?
Tell us your headcount and whether directors draw pay. We’ll confirm whether AIS applies, register you, and get the 1 March submission onto the calendar we already chase.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Thresholds, rates, penalties and filing rules are set by ACRA, IRAS, MOM and the relevant legislation and change over time; we have deliberately left the figures out. Please verify the current position or talk to us before making decisions. Morphrix Solutions Pte. Ltd. (formerly AG Solutions).