Your company must maintain proper records of its financial transactions and retain the source documents, accounting records and schedules, bank statements and any other records of transactions connected with your business.
For accounting records and supporting documents relating to Year of Assessment (YA) 2007 and the earlier YAs, your company must retain the records for a period of seven years from the relevant YA.
For YA 2008 and each subsequent YA, the record-keeping period has been reduced from seven to five years.
Examples:
Companies with December financial year-end
| YA |
Records for period |
To keep up to |
Remarks |
| 2002 |
1 Jan 2001 to 31 Dec 2001 |
31 Dec 2008 |
Seven years |
| 2008 |
1 Jan 2007 to 31 Dec 2007 |
31 Dec 2012 |
Five years |
Companies with non-December financial year-end, e.g. 30 Jun
| YA |
Records for period |
To keep up to |
Remarks |
| 2002 |
1 Jul 2000 to 30 Jun 2001 |
31 Dec 2008 |
Seven years |
| 2008 |
1 Jul 2006 to 30 Jun 2007 |
31 Dec 2012 |
Five years |
For more information on record keeping for businesses, please refer to Record keeping essentials for businesses.
Prior to YA 2008, the Income Tax Act allows IRAS to raise an assessment or additional assessment within six years after the end of that year of assessment. In keeping with the reduction of the record keeping period from seven years to five years with effect from YA 2008, the statutory time limit to raise an assessment or additional assessment has been accordingly reduced from six to four years. However, this statutory time limit will not apply to cases where fraud is involved.
Staggered time frame to raise time-barred assessments for Corporate Taxpayers
In view of the above, any assessment or additional assessment for the YA 2006 and YA 2008 will have to be raised by 31 Dec 2012 to avoid being time-barred. Assessments for YA 2007 may also have to be completed by 31 Dec 2012, particularly where there are loss items to be carried forward to set off against income for YA 2008. There is therefore a convergence of the statutory time limit for IRAS to raise assessments for YA 2006 to YA 2008 in year 2012. Please see Table 1.
To help the industry and IRAS manage workload and resources, IRAS will stagger the completion of assessments as follows (see Table 2):
- YA 2006 by year 2011
- YA 2007 and YA 2008 by year 2012
We seek your cooperation to surface issues that require resolution early and provide complete information on a prompt and timely basis. This will enable the completion of assessments according to the planned schedule.