UIF Declarations

There are two submissions that need to be made after month-end: an EMP201 and a UIF Declaration. This page provides more information on the UIF Declaration. More information on the EMP201 is available here.

SimplePay automatically generates the EMP201 and UIF Declaration documents based on the finalised payslips for the month. To include all payslips, it is, therefore, important to confirm that all payslips for the month have been finalised. Once payslips have been finalised, click Filing to view and submit the EMP201.

What Are UIF Declarations?

Employers need to submit a monthly UIF Declaration (also known as a UI-19 Form) to the Department of Employment and Labour (still commonly referred to as the DoL). This document contains information relating to UIF contributions (employer and employee) in respect of each employee, as well as their employment status and non-contribution reason, if applicable. Employees can receive UIF benefits only if they have made contributions to the Unemployment Insurance Fund. More information on assisting employees with UIF claims is available here.

Once the UIF Declaration has been submitted to the DoL, employers need to pay over the relevant contribution amount. The payment of the UIF, along with the PAYE and SDL due, is normally made via EFT to SARS. SARS acts as a collecting agent on behalf of the DoL – only if the employer is also registered for PAYE; if they are not, they pay the DoL directly. The UIF Declaration, therefore, allows the DoL to reconcile the UIF contributions for employees and employers with the payment received from SARS.

Finalising UIF Declarations

We strongly recommend that you also finalise both your EMP201 and UIF Declaration as part of your month-end procedures. This will:

• Allow the system to track changes or additions to payslips in that month and automatically generate updated versions of your submission documents if you need to re-submit;
• Remove the stamp saying “DRAFT” to indicate that the document is now a final document and no longer a draft; and
• Provide you with an audit trail of any changes or additions to the document.

View & Export

To view and export your UIF Declaration, go to Filing > Monthly Submissions.

View

When you click View under View & Export of your UIF Declaration, you will see a preview of it. This table provides you a quick and convenient way to check the information before submitting your declaration to the DoL. You can also export the Excel/PDF file directly from the web view screen.

Export

SimplePay provides an Excel and PDF export of your UIF Declaration. To download the file:

1. In the UIF Declaration section, select the file format from the drop-down.
2. Click Export PDF or Export Excel.

Codes on the UIF Declaration

When opening a UIF Declaration, you will see a column for Employment Status and Non-contribution Reason. The available Employment Status codes are explained on the Ending an Employee’s Service help page.

The Non-contribution Reason codes are explained on the Employment Classification and Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) help pages.

Employment Status codes

SimplePay reports the Employment Status code applicable as at the end of the month in the UIF Declaration, as instructed by the UIF. Due to this, the termination period and status code will not be reflected in the UIF Declaration if an employee is terminated and reinstated in the same month. This is a known issue with the UIF Declaration, and there is no indication from the UIF as to when this will be resolved. Please contact the UIF for guidance if you are affected by this issue.

Submitting to the UIF

SimplePay users have two options to submit their UIF Declarations: by using the Department’s uFiling website, or by using SimplePay’s built-in functionality to submit directly to the Department, as described below.

Use of uFiling

Due to the way that the Department’s systems are structured, uFiling is not updated with any declarations that are made using the SimplePay functionality. Therefore, if you choose to use the SimplePay declarations, it is not necessary to use uFiling as well, unless you have employees who are foreign nationals (see below).

Submitting to the UIF via SimplePay

You can view PDF and Excel versions of your UIF Declaration, either before or after finalising it. After finalising the UIF Declaration, you still have to click Submit.

The Electronic Status should first change to “awaiting_response” and later to “confirmed”:

“awaiting_response”

This means that the DoL hasn’t processed the UIF Declaration yet (for current declarations).

“confirmed”

A confirmation email is sent to the user who submitted the UIF Declaration on SimplePay.

Estimated processing time

If you hover over the question mark tooltip next to “awaiting_response”, you can get an estimate of the response date from the Department, based on the current average processing times.

If the Electronic Status for current submissions still hasn’t changed a week after the estimated processing time, please contact SimplePay.

Submissions for older periods

Submissions for older periods (older than six months) may be held back (in favour of submissions for newer periods) due to backlogs in processing at the UIF. This will be indicated when submitting the UIF Declaration and can also be seen when hovering over the question mark tooltip.

Downloading submission files and response

When the status for the UIF Declaration is confirmed, you can click confirmed to obtain more information regarding the submission:

• You can download the file submitted to the DoL by clicking the icon under Submission. While the format of these files may not be as useful for payroll administration as the Excel and PDF versions, they do serve as a record of the actual file submitted, should there be any queries or disputes with the DoL. If you do need to open this file in a spreadsheet, you can change the file name to have “.csv” at the end, which will allow you to open the file in Excel, Google Sheets, or other spreadsheet applications.
• You can also download the Response from the DoL, confirming that the processing of the submission has been successful.

Foreign Employees

The UIF has recommended that declarations for foreign employees be captured on uFiling to avoid delays with paying UIF benefits to foreign employees. When you click Submit for a finalised UIF Declaration, you will be notified of foreign employees in the UIF Declaration. These foreign employees will still be submitted as part of the UIF Declaration. However, as a precautionary measure, we recommend also submitting their declarations on uFiling.

Example of notification for foreign employees

Re-Submission

The UIF allows you to re-submit your UIF Declaration if any changes have occurred. After you’ve finalised a submission for a month, the system will track any changes or additions you make to payslips in that month and automatically generate a new version so that you may re-submit if necessary.

The SimplePay system will automatically generate a new UIF Declaration if:

• You get an error after submitting the UIF Declaration (see the section on error messages below).
• You make changes or updates to an employee’s termination, assuming that the UIF Declaration for the period was previously finalised. If the UIF Declaration is a draft (i.e. it has not been finalised) when making changes to an employee’s termination, the UIF Declaration will automatically be updated with the latest information overriding the previous information.

More information on terminations is available here.

UIF Error Messages

If you get an error after submitting the UIF Declaration, SimplePay automatically generates a new UIF Declaration. You can then make changes to the system to correct the error before finalising and submitting the new UIF Declaration.

False errors

When submitting your UIF Declaration, you may receive an “error” similar to the following:

“The following error(s) were found:
Line: 10 Employee : “8502210895088”, Bloggs, John 8270 – The date employed to is valid, and 8280 is 01, 09, 10″

This is actually not an error, as can be seen by the words ‘is valid’ – the UIF has expanded their system over the years, with one expansion being a way to remind employers that someone is on prolonged absence. Unfortunately, they did not put in new functionality for warnings, so they just decided to report it as an error instead.