You will audit three recent payslips against your contract and the CPF rate table and write down every question.
Three months into her job, Priya had three proper payslips, a signed contract and a folder of notes from this module. She also had a vague feeling that something in April had looked off, and no clear idea what. That feeling is common, and usually nobody does anything about it, because a vague worry is hard to turn into an email.
This exercise turns it into one. You'll check three recent payslips against your contract and the CPF rate table, line by line, and end with a list of specific questions. Set aside about 25 minutes. You need your last three payslips, your contract or key employment terms, the current CPF rate table from the CPF Board website and MOM's list of payslip items from lesson 1.2.
Before you look at a payslip, list the pay terms from your contract or your key employment terms. Write them down plainly: basic salary, each fixed allowance and its amount, the overtime rule, any bonus or thirteenth-month payment, and the unpaid leave method if the contract or handbook gives one.
This is your benchmark. Every line on a payslip should trace back to something on this list, or to a record of something that happened that month, such as overtime hours or leave taken.
Priya's list was short, and it had no bonus on it at all. It read: basic salary S$3,400, a transport allowance of S$200 a month, weekend event work at S$25 an hour, and unpaid leave taken off basic salary by working days, a rule she found in the staff handbook.
Go through MOM's list of required items for the first payslip, with a tick for each item you find and a cross for each one you don't. Do the same for the other two months, which goes quickly because payroll systems tend to produce the same layout every month.
Then compare the additions on each payslip with your step 1 list. Is basic salary the contract figure, and is every allowance there at the right amount? For overtime, compare the hours on the slip with your own record before you multiply by the rate. For a bonus, compare with the letter or email that told you the amount.
Priya's May payslip showed 12 hours of overtime and S$300 of overtime pay, while her own note said 16 hours across the two event days. At S$25 an hour, the 4 missing hours were worth S$100.
For each month, work out the wages that attract CPF and multiply by your employee rate from the current table. Lessons 1.3 and 1.4 covered what counts: fixed allowances and overtime pay are wages, reimbursements aren't, and a bonus is an additional wage.
Here are Priya's figures. As in lesson 1.3, they use a made-up employee rate of 18% to show the method, and the real rate for your age band is on the CPF Board's table.
In April her ordinary wages were S$3,400 plus S$200, so S$3,600, and her CPF should have been S$648. The payslip showed S$612, which is 18% of S$3,400, so the allowance had been left out of the calculation and her CPF was S$36 short that month.
In May her wages were S$3,400 plus S$200 plus S$300 of overtime as paid, which is S$3,900. If the missing S$100 is paid, the CPF on it should follow. Her taxi reimbursement was correctly left out.
In June she took two days of unpaid leave in a month with 21 working days. Under her handbook's method that's S$3,400 times 2 divided by 21, about S$323.81, which leaves wages of about S$3,276.19 and CPF of about S$589.71 before rounding, and that's what her payslip showed.
Then check the self-help group line against the fund's own table for your wage level.
A CPF deduction that's too low can look like good news, since more reached your bank account. It isn't good news at all. If your share was worked out on the wrong wage, your employer's share almost certainly was too, and less went into your CPF accounts than should have.
For each month, add the additions, subtract the deductions, and compare the result with net pay on the slip and with the amount that reached your bank account. When all three agree, the arithmetic is sound, though an input could still be wrong.
Write each discrepancy as one short, factual question with the month and the amount, and keep opinions out of it. HR can act on "In April, CPF seems to have been calculated on S$3,400 rather than S$3,600, leaving out my S$200 transport allowance. Could you check?" They can do very little with "My CPF is wrong."
Priya ended up with two questions, one about the April CPF calculation and one about the 4 hours of overtime missing from May, while June checked out on every line.
When you finish, you have a sheet with three columns, one per month, and a row for every payslip line. Each cell holds the payslip figure, your figure and either a tick or a question. Under it sits your short list of questions, each with a month and an amount. If you found nothing, that counts as a result too, because you now know your payroll is right and you have a sheet to repeat whenever your pay changes.
Your own three months go through the same steps next, and anything you can't reconcile becomes the basis of a short, polite email to HR.
Complete the three-month payslip audit sheet and draft a polite email to HR for any item you could not reconcile.
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