Incomes Register will affect the application for earnings-related daily allowance
As of the beginning of 2020, YTK will start to retrieve income information directly from the national Incomes Register. That will reduce the need for separate salary certificates. There will be some changes in the application for earnings-related daily allowance. In the future we will need fewer attachments to applications, and at the same time we will ask for some more information in the actual application.
Update, 2 July 2021
This is an old news article from 2019. When applying for earnings-related daily allowance, you still need to report the work you have done and the wages you have earned. The benefit of using the Incomes Register is that you can retrieve any income data directly to your application or report the earned income and let us retrieve the data from the Incomes Register. As a rule, any separate pay statements are no longer needed.
In other words, the Incomes Register does not compensate for you reporting work that has been carried out. We do not automatically check the Incomes Register data if we have not received any information from you about performed work. If you do not report the work with the idea that we will receive the information from the Incomes Register anyway, you may be in for a nasty surprise. If we have not received any information from you about the work you have done, we may pay you the earnings-related daily allowance in full. When it later transpires that the earnings-related daily allowance should have taken into account earned income from work, we will have to recover overpaid earnings-related daily allowance.
Therefore, remember to carefully report any work and earned income in your application.
At present, people consider applying for daily allowance to be somewhat laborious. That is affected most by the fact that many different documents are required as attachments to the application. It can be confusing, because the same documents may already have been submitted e.g. to the TE Office or other authorities. That will change for the better next year, when we will reform the application process of daily allowance. In the future you will give more information in the actual application, but separate attachments will only rarely be needed. That is a positive thing, because it makes it easier for you to apply for daily allowance and also allows us to make a decision on the daily allowance largely based on the information provided in the application.
The driver for the change is the national Incomes Register. It is a service to which employers send the income information, and they can be used in centralised fashion. Income information plays a key role in deciding on the right to receive earnings-related daily allowance and in calculating the amount of earnings-related daily allowance, and in the future we can retrieve that information directly from the Incomes Register. Thus as a general rule we no longer need separate salary certificates as attachments to applications.
Recommend greater level of detail in reporting to the Incomes Register for your employer
Employers are obliged to report the income information to the Incomes Register using at least the lower level of detail in reporting. In that case the data content is not, however, enough for deciding on the right to receive earnings-related daily allowance or calculating the amount of earnings-related daily allowance, so we will have to ask for a separate salary certificate and possibly other information in the future. That may delay the payment of daily allowance.
If the employer reports the income information using the lower level of detail, we will have to ask for further information e.g. about the following:
- type of employment (full-time/part-time)
- duration of employment
- form of salary
- reason for the termination of employment
- additions and the periods during which they were earned
- compensations related to the termination of employment
- period of unsalaried absence
- some of the reasons for unsalaried absences
Luckily, some 80% of the employers already use greater level of detail in reporting the income at present, and the rest of the employers should be encouraged to do so, too. When greater level of detail in reporting is used, we can solve most issues, and no separate documents need to be attached to the application for daily allowance.
Changes will take place next year
We will be able to retrieve the income data from the Incomes Register as of 2 January 2020. We will retrieve the income data in conjunction with the processing of applications. At this point, the changes in the application process itself are minor. The use of the new system and inquiries about missing income data and any specifications will at first increase our workload in processing and advisory services. Our goal is that it will not affect the schedules for the payment of daily allowance.
From February on we will be able to retrieve income data already when you are filling the application. Then you will provide more information in the application, and fewer attachments will be required. Our online service will be reformed completely after summer 2020, and then applying for daily allowance will become even easier.
Although we will start to use the Incomes Register at the turn of the year, our online service OmaYTK will ask you to send salary certificates as before until early February. However, we will also get your income data from the Incomes Register, so a salary certificate will no longer be necessary. The salary details found in the Incomes Register are not always enough, however, so you can speed up the processing of your case by attaching your salary certificate to the application, if it includes more detailed information than the Incomes Register.
You can check your own data in the Incomes Register at http://www.tulorekisteri.fi.
