Paghe locali e conformità contributiva in Filippine

The Philippines are a third country for Europe, with a fragmented social architecture split across three separate bodies: the Social Security System for social insurance, PhilHealth for health cover and the Pag-IBIG Fund for housing and savings. Each requires its own registration, filings and remittances; there is no single window.

Payroll is settled in Philippine pesos, and a euro area employer therefore carries the currency exposure on its wage bill. English is an official language alongside Filipino and serves as the working language of the administration, the courts and business: contracts, payslips and dealings with the authorities are in English, which considerably lightens the task of setting up a local team.

Payroll is not a reserved profession. The accountancy legislation reserves the public practice of accountancy, meaning the attestation of financial statements for a third party, to Certified Public Accountants; computing payslips and remitting contributions remain unrestricted. Representing a client before the revenue authority, by contrast, requires accreditation.

Philippine law tightly frames regular employee status, acquired at the end of a probationary period whose maximum length is fixed by statute, and writing is the norm for the contract itself. The classification of the role and the nature of the contract determine almost everything else: this is the point to settle before hiring.

Registration, for its part, is multiple. A company registers with the Securities and Exchange Commission, obtains its certificate of registration from the Bureau of Internal Revenue, then a mayor's permit and a barangay clearance from the local unit. Four windows, four files, and a sequence that must be respected.

Registration as an employer with the three funds is added to that. Only then does payroll become possible.

It is the employer that deducts tax from remuneration, files periodic returns and carries out a year-end reconciliation for each individual. Contributions are reported separately to each of the three funds, on their own timetables.

Remuneration includes a mandatory annual bonus, payable before the end of the year and computed on wages earned: it must be budgeted from the hiring date. Dismissal grounds are strictly framed by Philippine law, which imposes a two-stage written procedure that it is risky to shorten.

The Philippine file is the most fragmented of the group: four registration authorities and three social funds, each with its own document and its own renewal cycle. Assembling a partial file amounts to proving nothing at all.

A classic trap is to confuse the certificate of incorporation issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which never expires, with the general information sheet, which must be from the current year and alone reflects the present position of directors and share capital.

The mayor's permit, for its part, is renewed in January. A file received in February with the previous year's permit is incomplete, without any bad faith on the candidate's part.

Registration with the National Privacy Commission is expressly mandatory above a volume of sensitive data that a payroll provider reaches automatically. It is nonetheless very often overlooked in application files.