Balmori Software Inc.

[ Article ]

Balmori Software is pleased to announce that we are releasing a new version - Version 6.7 - of our SURE! PayMaster payroll processing solution. This version was made necessary by the need to interface with a new software utility program being distributed by the BIR, which the BIR calls the "Alphalist Ver. 2.0 SAWT/MAP" utility.

Corporate taxpayers have long been required to submit various reports to the BIR, albeit in paper form. The BIR now requires companies with more than 10 employees to submit these reports electronically. This free utility program from the BIR enables Philippine taxpaying corporations to submit electronically to the BIR the Summary Alphalist of Withholding Agents of Income Payments Subjected to Tax Withheld at Source (SAWT), and the Monthly Alphalist of Payees (MAP) reports.

(The BIR's free utility also addresses the reporting concerns of tax-withholding agents dealing with non-employees, such as consultants and sub-contractors. But this article focuses on the concerns of taxpayer companies reporting on their employees via BIR Form 1604 CF, which is an annual report.)

Background

For a few years now, the BIR has taken the official position that taxpayers should submit the various SAWT/MAP reports to the BIR electronically. However, for much of that time, implementing guidelines were scarce; and so that diktat could not realistically be complied with by even the most timid taxpayer.
Early this year, the BIR released a beta (or experimental) version of its Alphalist generation utility. Among its features was the ability to maintain employer and employee records, employee earnings for the year, and to output the Alphalist to a text file on diskette, thence to be submitted to the BIR. This utility eliminates the need for BIR to re-input data that taxpayers previously submitted via paper reports.

This BIR-developed utility makes it easy for the withholding agent (i.e., the taxpayer) to comply with the electronic submission requirements of the BIR, by entering all the necessary information about itself, and the individuals and corporations from whom it withheld taxes.

A fly in the ointment

This solves the BIR's data-encoding problem; but you can't use the adverb "neatly." The encoding work is merely outsourced (to the taxpayer), not eliminated. For the typical civilian using this free BIR-supplied program, the practical reality is that he would still have to manually enter all of these data into the utility program's database. In real life, the user would take data produced by his company's payroll process - whether that process be manual or computerized - and manually re-input the finished data into the BIR's alphalist generation utility.

As everybody who does not work with a carabao knows, each incidence of manual data-encoding is one more opportunity for mistakes to creep into a database, whether it's keyed in by the BIR, by Ms. Moneypenny, or by you and me. The whole world is full of flawed data, but one sure way to minimize data errors is to eliminate incidences of manual data-encoding. Here's where Balmori Software's SURE! PayMaster V.6.7 comes in.

Current state of affairs

As of November 2006, the Alphalist generation utility is now formally released; the BIR is no longer referring to it as a "beta" version.*

Balmori Software's new SURE! PayMaster V.6.7 eliminates the need for SURE! PayMaster users to manually re-encode SURE! PayMaster output into the BIR's Alphalist utility in order to produce an electronic Form 1604 CF. SURE! Paymaster V.6.7 automatically creates this electronic file that BIR requires. So here's how things stand today: the BIR outsources the data-inputting to the taxpayer via the Alphalist data entry utility; and SURE! PayMaster V.6.7 in turn eliminates the aggravating manual data-inputting aspect of that new requirement.

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*All the measures described in this article are occasioned by BIR Revenue Memorandum Circular No. 3-2006. To read the full text of this circular, visit http://www.bir.gov.ph/iss_rul/cir2006.htm; then, click on the link corresponding to Circular 3-2006. -rsr

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Questions? Reactions? Write to balmori@balmorisoftware.com.

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