Singapore Expats

I am a frequent business travellers, more than 50% of time away, who can have some tax benefits by "Time-Apportionment of Singapore Employment Income" tax concession. I had been frequent travellers since year 2001 but I noticed this concession very recently. Question is whether I can file those tax concessions for previous years I missed.
Is there anyone who had tried to appeal for those missed concessions and successfully had returns missed ??

Your reply will be appreciated.

Could you, please, explain the Time apportionment issue. Do you get taxed less if you are out of the country x number of days?

Had the same thing when I worked in Europe, didn't know it existed here.

Singapore_Sling wrote:Could you, please, explain the Time apportionment issue. Do you get taxed less if you are out of the country x number of days?

Had the same thing when I worked in Europe, didn't know it existed here.

Yes, exactly.. If you travel more than 90 days I believe, you can get taxed less. Now I am trying to get this benefits for year 2001,2002,2003.
Because I didn't know it existed here either for last 4 years...

I believe it is worth to appeal on this.

Even though tax is so low here, there is certainly no point in not using the legislation to your advantage.

Thank you for that, I will also check this out - let you know if I find anything else on it.

Interesting indeed. Here's what the MOF has to say:

http://app.mof.gov.sg/faq/faq.asp?categ ... ortionment

Note the three catches:
Criteria 1: You must first qualify for the NOR Scheme;
Criteria 2: You must be exercising a Singapore employment and must spend at least 90 days outside of Singapore for business reasons; and
Criteria 3: Your income tax computed on your total Singapore employment income must be greater than 10%.

And here's more about the Not Ordinarily Resident Scheme:

http://app.mof.gov.sg/faq/faq.asp?categ ... ns+for+NOR

Basically, if you've arrived in Singapore in 1998 or later, you may qualify.

Be aware that this filing can be complex due to double-taxation agreements with other countries and takes the IRAS a hell of a lot of time to process. In 2003, I spent about 250 days working overseas. For my April 2004 tax filing, due to the complicated nature of the filing, my employer hired PwC Tax Consultants to do the filing for us. IRAS only finished assessing my taxes for 2003 in December 2004, and they came up with a low low figure of only S$1071 in taxes for the whole year

It'll be interesting how my April 2005 filing turns out...I spent less than a month in Singapore during 2004.

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Regards;
S.A.