The Minister of Finance has announced a wage subsidy for certain business registered for tax (irrespective whether they ow tax) effective April 2020 until June 2020.

Please click here to view the guidelines for the Covid-19 wage subsidy.

Qualifying employers (all conditions must be met):

• All business sectors are eligible except those listed in section 2 of the guidelines.
• The employer must be registered with BURS (if not registered, they must register with BURS using the e-service portal). The employer must have a TIN to claim.
• The employer must make a commitment not to retrench employees as a result of the pandemic.
• The employers must produce a wage bill (see attached) from December 2019 until the current period.

Qualifying employees:

• Only citizen employees employed at qualifying employers.
• Temporary employees and employees employed are more than one employer qualifies – please refer to the guide for more information.

Application procedure:

• Qualifying employers must complete the Covid-19 Wage Subsidy Claim Form (see attached) and submit it online using the e-service portal.
• The successful applicant must submit the claim form each month before the 15^th of the month in order to facilitate payment in that month (will be paid by BURS by the 25^th of that month). Claims received after the 15^th will be paid in the subsequent month. The April deadline has been extended to the 20^th of April and payment will be made by BURS by the 28^th of April 2020.
• Any employer who is found to have abused the subsidy shall be liable for prosecution.

Calculation of wage subsidy:

• The basis of the subsidy is 50% of the employee’s monthly wages with a minimum of P1000 per month and a maximum of P2500 per month for each qualifying employee. Please refer to the guide for a diagrammatic illustration.
• Currently is it unclear if the wage subsidy is included in employment income and is subject to PAYE – further clarity must be provided.

Submission of the Wage Subsidy Claims:

All information currently available has been posted on http://www.burs.org.bw/.

There is some uncertainty as to what’s required for certain fields of the BURS COVID-19 WAGE SUBSIDY CLAIM FORM and urgent clarification has been requested from BURS. Sage will inform you here on Sage City once we have more details.

Link to download claim form (in .csv format) http://www.burs.org.bw/images/img/BURS%20COVID-19%20WAGE%20SUBSIDY%20CLAIM%20FORM.csv 

Work-around suggested to extract financial values should you wish to complete the form:

• Use the 12-Month History Report to extract the required fixed and financial values for the required months.
• Click here for a guide on How to print the 12 Month History Report
• The only field not available in the 12 Month History report, is the employee telephone number. This field can be extracted with a Flexi Fixed report, and can be combined with a merging data with a vlookup.
• Please visit http://www.burs.org.bw/ for guidelines to complete and submit the form.

Update 05/05/2020

Sage has received confirmation from BURS that the wage subsidy should be included in the employee’s employment income/remuneration and is subject to PAYE.

BURS has also created a list of officers who are able/responsible to respond to Covid-19 wage subsidy queries – Employer can make use of this list for any related queries.