Incomes Register

The Incomes Register enables automated payroll data filing. As an employer, you file data with the Incomes Register, which shares them with different users. You need to file with the Incomes Register within five days of every salary payment and with details of each recipient.

Help for information sharing from technology

The recommended and easiest way is to use the Income Register’s technical interface to file salary data. This means that there is an electronic connection built between your payroll system and the Incomes Register, allowing reliable and automatic data sharing between the two systems. This reduces manual work stages. If you want to automate salary data filing, ensure that a technical interface is built between your payroll system and the Incomes Register.

Your accounting firm and the Tax Administration can provide further information about the technical interface.

File income data as accurately as possible

The Incomes Register enables many things. Each employer decides on how much information to file with the Incomes Register and on how it affects his or her day-to-day work. You can report just the obligatory information to the Incomes Register, in accordance with the minimum requirements. As an employer, however, it may be worth your while to provide as much information as possible when paying salary, as it could make clarifying matters afterwards easier. As an employer, you should assess what the best solution for your business is.

The voluntary or supplementary data which you can file with the Incomes Register are data needed for decisions on benefits, client fees and compensation processing. When you apply for benefits yourself as an employer, that occupies your time. On the other hand, when your employee applies for benefits, that is an indirect burden on your time, as the employee may need to ask you for a payslip, or the benefits issuer may ask you for clarifications. When you file supplementary data when paying salary as an employer, there are fewer searches for past documents and manual investigations.

Only file with the Incomes Register on paper for a special reason

Online filing is a basic requirement for using the Incomes Register. Information can only be filed on paper if there is a special reason for doing so. Such a special reason could be considered a situation in which a natural person, estate, casual employer or foreigner does not have the opportunity to provide data electronically. You cannot file with the Incomes Register over the phone. Data must be provided in set formats.

You can learn about electronic payroll and data filing on palkka.fi, a free service especially aimed at small business owners and households. It is a statutory government service. You can use palkka.fi to calculate a business’s salaries and report data directly to the Incomes Register.

Failure to file carries penalties

If you are obliged to file incomes data, the Tax Administration can set you a negligence penalty if

• a filing is incomplete or incorrect and
• the filing has not been corrected, in spite of an order to do so, or an acceptable explanation for the error has not been given by the deadline.

The Tax Administration may waive or reduce the negligence penalty if there was a justified reason for the error. Depending on the number of faulty or incomplete filings, the negligence penalty can range from €100 to €1,000.