The honest answer is that nothing dramatic happens immediately, which is exactly why this problem compounds. Nobody appears at your office the day after a deadline. The consequences arrive in stages, and each stage is harder to unwind than the last.
Stage one: penalties
ACRA imposes late lodgement penalties for filings submitted after their due date. IRAS applies its own penalties for late tax filing and late payment. Amounts are set by the agencies and are revised from time to time, so treat any figure you read online — including the ones your provider quotes from memory — as something to verify rather than rely on.
Stage two: IRAS estimates for you
This is the consequence directors least expect. If you do not file, IRAS can issue an assessment based on its own estimate of your income. That estimated assessment is legally payable even if it is higher than your actual liability, and objecting to it has its own deadline. Silence does not pause your tax position; it hands the calculation to someone with no visibility of your accounts.
Stage three: enforcement
Continued non-filing escalates. Composition offers, summonses and prosecution are all available to the agencies, and they are directed at directors personally, not only at the company. A director who has left the country is still a director.
Stage four: disqualification
Under the Companies Act a director who persistently defaults on filing obligations may be disqualified from acting as a director. Persistent means what it sounds like — a pattern across filings and years rather than one missed date. It is the outcome that turns an administrative lapse into something that follows you to your next company.
What to do if you are already late
- File. Late is a smaller problem than outstanding, and the gap between them grows every month.
- Work out the full picture before you start fixing pieces. Companies that are late on one filing are frequently late on others, and correcting them out of sequence creates rework.
- Deal with any estimated assessment properly and within its own deadline, rather than ignoring it in the hope it lapses.
- Get the registers straight at the same time. Rectification work is easier done once than three times.
A reasonable first step
If you are not certain where you stand — and many directors genuinely are not, particularly after a provider change — a review of your visible ACRA and IRAS position will tell you. Ours is free and carries no obligation to move your business. It is a high-level review rather than an audit, and it will not catch everything, but it will usually tell you whether you have a problem and roughly how big it is.
The compliance screening is a review of publicly visible filing information and the documents you provide. It is not an audit, a legal opinion or a tax opinion, and it is not a guarantee of compliance.
This article is general information about Singapore corporate requirements, current at the date of publication. It is not legal, tax or accounting advice. Penalty amounts and enforcement practice are set by ACRA and IRAS and change from time to time — verify your own position with them, or speak to us about your specific circumstances.