You will be able to compare the income and reliefs on your notice with your own records and spot what is missing.
Wei Jie's mother moved in with him last year, after his father passed away. He pays for most of her living costs and takes her to her medical appointments. When a colleague mentioned parent relief over lunch, Wei Jie said he assumed IRAS knew his situation and would have added anything he was entitled to. Then he opened his notice of assessment and found no parent relief on it at all.
IRAS knows a lot, because employers, CPF and other bodies send it information. It doesn't know everything about your life, and some reliefs only appear if you claim them. This lesson shows you how to check the two parts of the notice that you can actually verify yourself: the income, and the reliefs.
Your employer gives you a statement of your employment income for each year, usually the IR8A form. If your employer is in the auto-inclusion scheme, it sends the same information to IRAS, and that's the figure on your notice.
Put the two side by side. The employment income on the notice should match the total on your IR8A. If you had more than one employer in the year, add up all your IR8As and compare the total. If any employer wasn't in the scheme, check that you declared that income yourself when you filed.
Look especially at bonuses and one-off payments, and at the months around a job change. Those are where figures most often go missing or get counted twice. If the IR8A itself looks wrong, compare it with your payslips, which you already know how to check from module 1.
If the income on the notice is wrong because your employer reported it wrongly, ask your employer to send IRAS an amended figure. Lesson 4.3 covers what to do about the assessment itself.
Wei Jie's income matched his IR8A to the dollar. Good. That left the reliefs.
Some reliefs are added without you doing anything, because IRAS gets the information directly. CPF relief on your compulsory employee contributions is one: IRAS receives your contributions from the CPF Board and grants the relief automatically. Earned income relief is another, given to people with earned income. Reliefs linked to information from other agencies, such as relief for national servicemen, are generally pre-filled too.
Even so, check them. Compare the CPF relief on your notice with the employee CPF on your payslips and IR8A for the year. If they're far apart, find out why.
Other reliefs depend on facts IRAS can't see, such as who lives with you, who you support and what conditions apply. Parent relief is the usual example. It's for supporting a parent or grandparent who meets IRAS's conditions on age, residence and income. Whether a relief is pre-filled can depend on whether you claimed it before, so a first claim is the one most likely to be missed.
IRAS publishes the full list of reliefs on its website, with the conditions for each and whether you need to claim it. Reliefs are added, changed and removed from time to time, so read the list for the Year of Assessment on your notice, not an article from a few years ago.
Wei Jie went through the list. His mother met the age and residence conditions, and he checked the income condition on the IRAS website. He'd never claimed parent relief, so it wasn't pre-filled. If two siblings support the same parent, the relief may need to be shared, and IRAS explains how. Wei Jie's brother lived overseas and didn't claim, which made his case simple.
A relief reduces your chargeable income, not your tax directly. So a relief saves you tax at your highest rate, the rate on the top slice of your income.
Using the invented practice table from lesson 4.1, How the notice of assessment gets from income to tax payable, Wei Jie's top slice was taxed at 6%. If the parent relief he'd missed was S$5,000, as an example figure, his chargeable income would fall from S$48,200 to S$43,200, and his tax from S$1,092 to S$792. That's a saving of S$300, which is 6% of S$5,000. With the real rate table and the real relief amount, his figures would differ, but the method is the same.
For someone with a higher income, the same relief saves more, because their top rate is higher. For someone whose chargeable income is already in the zero band, it saves nothing. That's worth knowing before you spend hours on a relief claim.
Every relief must be supported by records. IRAS can ask you for evidence that you qualified, and it can review claims after the notice is issued. Keep receipts, letters and any documents that show you met the conditions, such as proof of address for a parent living with you.
IRAS sets how long you must keep these records, and the period is on its website. Keep each year's documents together, in the folder you'll set up in lesson 8.5, Build your document file and checklist, so you can produce them quickly if asked.
Wei Jie saved a copy of his mother's address details and noted to claim parent relief when he next filed. He also had to decide about the year already assessed, which lesson 4.3 deals with.
Before the activity, open your latest notice and the IRAS relief list for the same Year of Assessment in two windows, and have your IR8A nearby.
List the reliefs on your notice, then check the IRAS relief list and note any you may be eligible for but did not claim.
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