Secured AIS Submission in Prosoft: IRAS API
As part of the Prosoft transformation journey to be a world-class SAAS product, one of the goals that we’re trying to achieve is to deliver a secure space for organizations’ people data. This is aligned with the current technology trend in the market. Several countries in APAC, like Australia and Singapore, have introduced statutory submission via payroll vendor instead of direct manual submission since around 2018. It won’t be surprising that other countries will soon follow this initiative since the authority will be able to ensure the data is submitted correctly and securely to their system by putting payroll vendors through a complex assessment and validation of specific payroll data cases. Avoiding a manual submission also means that we don’t expose a considerable amount of confidential employee data in a local machine and through the upload process to a website, creating security risks.
Statutory submission through IRAS API
In Singapore, the previously optional submission method through payroll vendors is becoming mandatory for most organizations to submit statutory reports. The Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS) has announced that the Auto-Inclusion Scheme (AIS) Offline Applications (including the validation & submission Java Applications) will be decommissioned by the calendar year 2023. From the year of assessment 2023 onwards, in line with IRAS' initiative to improve the tax submission process, payroll vendors are to use the Application Programming Interface (API) for the submission of employment income information of employees to IRAS. As Prosoft is directly integrated with IRAS through the API, the submitted employment income will be verified against IRAS' validation logic.
Prosoft is one of the first few payroll software vendors that support the IRAS API since 2018 and was awarded the A category of Software Compliance to Controls, the highest category according to IRAS. This means that Prosoft complies with the list of recommended controls, all 23 of them, for all submission form types (IR8A, IR8S, Appendix 8A, Appendix 8B).
What does this mean for most organizations?
For most organizations in Singapore, this will be a big move in how the statutory submission works. The mandatory submission through payroll vendors means that Prosoft will connect directly to IRAS through API. All submitted data from Prosoft will then be validated with some standardized logic before getting accepted from IRAS.
If your organizations are Unit4 SAAS customers, the connection is available already; you need to ensure you try it before the submission deadline period. We prepared the guide in the newsletter that you may check in the Community 4U here and the FAQ here. Since there is some data validation involved during the process, please make sure that you check the submission log when you encounter errors during submission.
If your organizations still use the on-premise version, you need extra steps to enable this function, primarily the firewall between your on-premise Prosoft and the Cloud Unit4 Services that communicate with IRAS needs to be opened. Please follow the guide for on-premise customers here.
