Annual Employer's Returns

SimplePay automatically generates the IR56B documents required for you to do your year-end filing with the Inland Revenue Department (IRD), based on finalised payslips for the relevant tax year.

An IR56B is an employer's return of remuneration and pensions for each eligible employee for the relevant tax year. IR56Bs must be submitted to the IRD together with the completed BIR56A (sometimes informally called the IR56A) within one month of receiving it from the IRD. SimplePay doesn't generate the BIR56A itself as this is issued directly to employers by the IRD each year.

The IR56B is applicable to employees, whether resident in Hong Kong or not, whose total income for the year from 1 April to 31 March is in excess of $ 145,000. If they're employed for less than a year, the income is reduced proportionately.

To access your IR56Bs:

  1. Go to Filing.
  2. Click the Annual Employer's Returns (IR56B) tab.

Pre-validation

Click Click here (below Filing season) to pre-validate your data. This opens a pre-validation pop-up that flags potential issues before you submit your documents to the IRD.

Monitoring pre-validation progress

Clicking a hyperlinked error or warning (e.g. a tax certificate label, employee name, or Company Validation Warnings) opens a new tab where you can correct the data. The pre-validation pop-up stays open in its original tab, and you can refresh it to see how many more errors or warnings you have to address.

There are several actions you can take on this screen:

  • Click the PDF icon in the View column to download the IR56B form that SimplePay has generated per employee.

    Title strikethrough on the IR56B PDF

    If you selected a Title for the employee on their Basic Info screen, the titles you didn't select are struck through on the generated PDF. If no Title was selected, none of the titles are struck through. See the Basic Info help page for more on the Title field.

  • Click the Edit option in the View column to change information related to their tax certificate.
  • Click All Tax Certificates to open a new tab with the combined tax information of the relevant employees.
  • Click XML data file containing IR56B records to download an XML file for e-submission.
  • Click Tax summary to download a summary of employees' income during the tax year.

Take-on balances

Where take-on balances were entered, these values will also be included in the IR56Bs. More information on entering take-on balances can be found here.