First S$7b in Jobs Support Scheme wage subsidies to be paid from Wednesday

EMPLOYERS are to get the first tranche of wage subsidies under the Jobs Support Scheme, with more than S$7 billion to be disbursed, from Wednesday.

More than 140,000 employers - as well as 1.9 million of their citizen and permanent-resident workers - are expected to benefit from the upcoming payout, said the Ministry of Finance and the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore in a joint statement.

The Jobs Support Scheme was unveiled by Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat in his February Budget and twice enhanced thereafter. Under it, the government will foot the bill for part of local employees' monthly wages for the nine months from October 2019 to July 2020.

After this tranche, the next two rounds of wage subsidies are to be paid in July and in October.

"As part of the government's efforts to help companies and workers with both cash and cash flow during this trying period, the implementing agencies have been working very hard to bring forward the first payouts under the Jobs Support Scheme to April," Mr Heng wrote on Facebook on Wednesday. The payment was originally slated for May.

As the Covid-19 pandemic worsened in March, Mr Heng set aside S$15.1 billion to cover at least 25 per cent of the first S$4,600 on each local worker's pay cheque.

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There was a higher co-funding threshold of 50 per cent for food-services companies and 75 per cent for businesses in the aviation and tourism industries, which were deemed more badly affected by the spread of the deadly and highly contagious Covid-19 illness.

Mr Heng, who is also Finance Minister, later committed another S$2.9 billion to cover an expanded 75 per cent of local wages for all sectors for the month of April, to soothe the blow to businesses from month-long workplace closure measures. This has gone into the maiden tranche of payments, which also includes wage subsidies for salaries paid in the fourth quarter of 2019.

The ongoing wage payouts will be credited directly to the registered bank accounts of employers that earlier signed up for PayNow Corporate or have ongoing Giro arrangements with the taxman.

Companies that have not set up these payment modes will receive cheques from April 23.