What the Government May Not Tell You About the PIC

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Everybody knows that the PIC (Productivity and Innovation Credit) scheme is about the government handling out $60,000 cash every year (from 2012 to 2017) on your spendings on External Training, Internal Training, IT, Automation Equipment, Websites and Intellectual Property Rights.  However, the following are the 5 things that the government may not tell you about the PIC:

1. The PIC Bonus scheme, which is expiring in 2014, is given to you automatically without you applying.  What they may not tell you is that if your financial year-end is in 30 June, then your PIC Bonus has already expired on 30 June 2014.  Note that once expired, the PIC Bonus will not be renewed.  The government will not send out reminders and companies can only blame themselves if they realized that they have not receive the full $15,000 PIC Bonus.
2. PIC is given to all entities, including non-profit organizations like clubs and societies.  However, non-profit entities do not get cash payout, they only receive additional 300% tax deductions on their PIC spendings.  Since most of such organizations do not pay tax, having 300% tax deduction on PIC spendings is irrelevant.  In short, non-profit entities will benefit much less from PIC scheme.  But they are still able to get the $15,000 PIC Cash Bonus as long as their PIC claims exceeds $5,000 in a year.
3. On the PIC Cash Payout Form, the government says that 'this form and the annex may take you 10 minutes to complete'.  What they do not tell us is that you have to take anything from 10 minutes to days to extract the PIC spendings from your accounting records.  In short, it's rare to complete the form in 10 minutes!
4. Partial Claims.  It is not clear that you can do partial claims, and if you miss out some items in your last year's claim, can you still claim them now?  Well, the answer from the IRAS office is 'Yes, as long as there is no duplicate claim and it is a genuine claime'.
5. How the PIC Spending is allocated.  Yes, the limit for cash payout is $100,000 yearly, but there is no requirement on how this $100,000 is made up of.  For example, can you claim the entire amount on just one type of expenditure?   It appears that this is one flexibility the government is giving us on PIC claims: there is no pre-set limit for any type of PIC expenditure.

By Andy Ng, Chief Trainer at Asia Trainers, details of training are at here http://asiatrainers.com/SeminarsList.php.  Related articles:

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