Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of questions, mainly from self-employed people as to why they are getting rejection letters from MSD with regards to their wage subsidy. My first piece of advice is to not worry. I initially received a rejection letter as well, but two days later, they paid the subsidy into my bank account. Yay!
Based on my personal experience though, I do believe that there are some mistakes that self-employed individuals may possibly make in applying for their wage subsidy. I would like to state a disclaimer here that the opinions contained in this article are based on my personal experience and that your situation may be different from mine – so results may vary.
If you got rejected for your wage subsidy, you will want to re-apply (as per the email received from MSD) but in making your re-application you will want to make sure that you have the following things correctly recorded:
No.1: You have written down your full, legal name
If you are self-employed – put down your full name here as per your passport or birth certificate. For myself, I would put my name down as Samir Bin Harith, not Sam Harith (even if Sam is what my mum, dad and friends call me). If you are trading as a business, DO NOT put down that trading name. I would not put ‘The Comic Accountant’ in my application simply because that is not the name associated with my IRD number.
No.2: That you have gotten your IRD number correct
I know this might sound simple – but there are 9 digits in that IRD code. That means that there is at least a 1/9 chance that you will get one digit wrong. Key in your IRD number, double check it and then triple check it again! If you want a fool-proof method, login to your My IR, copy your IRD number and paste it straight into your application form. This will hopefully help any human error that may occur in copying it manually.
No.3: That you have declared your self-employment income on IRD
This is probably the bit where most self-employed people get stuck at. Remember that guide I wrote to filing taxes for self-employed people on My IR? So there is a section under your income tax where you can add income types. Under this income type you need to have added self-employment income as an income type. My guess is that MSD will communicate with IRD to make sure that you have self-employed income declared – otherwise they won’t pay you the subsidy, simply because the details you supplied don’t match up.
If you have already filed your 2020 income taxes AND included your self-employed income, good job! This further reinforces your claim that you are self-employed. If you have already filed but not included your self-employed income, you can amend your return to include it (drop me a message if you need help with this). If you haven’t filed for 2020 – then you should do so as soon as My IR is back online! (It is closed for maintenance purposes until 16 April 2020).
Hopefully after checking off those three things, your subsidy should be processed by MSD and you should receive it within a week or so. Stay calm, re-apply and this time, make sure you have done everything correctly!
