Client details are withheld; the account below describes the documents and our scoping, not the person.

The enquiry came in as a short list rather than a question. Malaysian payslips, some LHDN tax forms, a birth certificate, roughly eleven pages in all, Malay into English, each one notarised, for a Singapore permanent residence application. Nothing had been uploaded yet.

On paper this looks like a routine bundle. In practice, LHDN tax forms for a Singapore PR application raise a question most applicants only notice halfway through: which years, and which forms, do the pages actually cover? A translation cannot answer that for you. It can, though, make the answer visible to the officer who reads the file, or it can blur it. This case study is about keeping it visible.

Two clocks on one checklist

When we scope a PR bundle, we start from the document list the applicant will be working against, not from the pages they happen to have. ICA publishes a PR document checklist alongside the PR application e-service, and the version we read while scoping this enquiry asks for income evidence on two different timescales.

Payslips are listed for the last six months. Income tax assessments or receipts are listed for the latest three years, and that line carries a qualifier: it applies to applicants who have been working overseas. A birth certificate appears too, but only for births not registered in Singapore.

So the client’s eleven pages were really answering three separate checklist lines, each with its own period. The payslips run on a monthly clock. The tax forms run on an annual one. The birth certificate has no clock at all, but it fixes how every name in the bundle should be spelled. Mixing those up is easy when everything arrives as one PDF called “income documents”.

We never tell an applicant which checklist lines apply to them; that depends on their own circumstances and on what ICA asks for in their case. What we can do is label each translated document clearly enough that the applicant, and later the officer, can match it to the right line without guessing.

Why a Malaysian tax year is not labelled the way you expect

The part of this job that deserved the most care was not vocabulary. It was dates.

Malaysian income tax paperwork for individuals is organised by Tahun Taksiran, the year of assessment. LHDN’s own filing programme shows how it works: for employment income, the year of assessment takes the same number as the calendar year in which the income was earned, and the return for that year is filed in the following year. An employer’s remuneration statement, meanwhile, refers to Tahun Saraan, the remuneration year.

That produces a trap for anyone counting back three years. A client who looks at the dates on which they filed will count one way. A client who looks at the year printed in the form’s heading will count another. Both counts can sound right in conversation, and they point at different sets of pages.

Our job here is narrow and strict. The translation reproduces the year exactly as the form states it, under the label the form uses. If the heading says Tahun Taksiran, the English says “Year of Assessment”, not “tax year” and certainly not “2025 tax return” when the form says something else. We do not relabel a form to fit the checklist. If the years on the client’s forms do not line up with what they need, that is something they have to resolve with the right documents, not with a friendlier translation.

Borang BE, Borang B and the other return forms

LHDN uses different return forms for different kinds of taxpayer. Borang BE is for resident individuals who do not carry on a business. Borang B is for resident individuals who do. There are further forms for non-residents (Borang M) and for certain knowledge-worker categories (BT and MT). The form’s letter code is printed on the document, and it tells a reader what kind of income the return was designed to report.

We keep that code in the translation, written exactly as it appears, with the Malay name of the form alongside its English rendering. An officer reading “Form BE (Borang BE)” knows at once that the original is the resident, no-business return. If the code were dropped and replaced with a generic “Income Tax Return”, that information would quietly disappear.

EA and EC are employer statements, not returns

Applicants often call the EA form their “tax form”, and in a sense it is. Legally, though, it is a statement of remuneration that the employer prepares and hands to the employee. LHDN’s filing programme names it Borang C.P.8A (EA) for the private sector and C.P.8C (EC) for the public sector. It reports what the employer paid. It is not the employee’s return, and it is not a notice of assessment.

That distinction matters for an ICA PR file. If the checklist line in front of the applicant speaks of an “assessment” or a “receipt”, an EA form on its own may or may not be what they need. That is not ours to judge. But the translation should never make an EA form look like something it is not, so the heading stays “Statement of Remuneration from Employment (C.P.8A / EA)”, in full.

Return, printout or notice?

Much Malaysian filing now happens online, through e-filing. What a client holds at the end of that process can be a printout of the submitted return, a system-generated confirmation, or a letter from LHDN. Each looks different, and each says different things about the year in question.

Before quoting, we want to see which of these the client actually has, page by page. A translator who works from a description (“my tax return for three years”) risks preparing a translation of a confirmation page under the assumption that it is a full return. We would rather ask once than certify the wrong expectation.

One person, one name, across eleven pages

Payslips, tax forms and a birth certificate come from three different issuers: an employer’s payroll system, the tax authority and the national registration department. Each spells and orders names in its own way. A payroll system might truncate a long name. A tax form might use the name as registered on the identity card. The birth certificate records the name as it was registered at birth, sometimes with a parent’s name attached through bin or binti, sometimes in a format that has since changed.

An officer reading an income file is, among other things, checking that every page belongs to the same person. If the English versions show three different spellings because three translators made three different choices, the officer has a question the original documents never raised.

Malaysian documents usually print names in Latin script already, so there is nothing to transliterate. The rule we apply is the opposite of tidying up: every name is copied exactly as each issuer printed it, on every page, by the same translator, so the English never introduces a variation the originals do not have. The one place we choose a spelling is in our own wording, such as the translator’s statement, and there we use the passport form throughout.

Where the originals themselves disagree, we tell the client before the work begins, so they can decide whether ICA needs anything from them to explain it. We do not “harmonise” names that the issuers wrote differently, because a translation that quietly corrects a source document is no longer a faithful translation.

How we scoped a bundle we had not seen

Without uploads, a quote is a guess. “About eleven pages” might mean eleven sheets, or eleven sides, or eleven documents, and payslips in particular often carry information on both sides or run onto a second page. So the scoping steps were written for the client to follow before anything was priced.

  1. Upload every page of every document, including reverse sides and any page that looks blank apart from a stamp or a footer.
  2. Keep each document as its own file, named by its type and the period it covers, so payslip months and assessment years can be read at a glance.
  3. Look at the year printed on each tax form and note it next to the file name, using the form’s own label.
  4. Send a copy of the passport bio page, so we can see which spelling the client uses in Singapore and flag any differences early.
  5. Tell us which checklist lines the documents are meant to answer, as the client understands them. We will not confirm the list, but knowing it helps us notice an obvious gap, such as a payslip run that stops a month short.

For the certification itself, the client asked for each document to be notarised separately, and that is what we scoped. ICA’s published guidance accepts more than one route for translating documents that are not in English: a translation from the embassy of the issuing country, a translation by a notary public, or a private translation attested by that embassy or notarised by a notary public. ICA does not endorse any private translation company. Notarisation is one recognised route, not a universal rule, and we said so rather than selling it as compulsory.

Each translation will carry our translator’s statement of accuracy, a clear link to the source pages it was made from, and the notarial certificate for the route the client chose. The ringgit amounts and identity numbers on the originals are copied exactly as printed; nothing is converted, totalled or corrected.

Where the birth certificate fits

It is easy to treat the birth certificate as the odd one out in an income bundle. In fact it does two jobs. It answers its own checklist line for an applicant whose birth was not registered in Singapore, and it gives us the most formal record of the applicant’s name to check the other pages against.

Malaysian birth certificates vary a great deal by era. Older ones may be handwritten forms with entries on both sides, and newer ones are printed. We scope them separately from the financial pages for exactly that reason. Our page on birth certificate translation for ICA files explains what we look for on these documents, and the earlier case study on scoping an older Borang A shows how much an issue year can change the work.

Where it stands

At the time of writing, the client knows what to upload, how to label it, and why the years on the tax forms need a second look before anything is translated. The quote will follow once the real pages are in. We have not seen the application, we make no prediction about it, and the decision on any PR application rests with ICA alone.

What the scoping did achieve is a bundle that will be easy to read. Every document will say what it is, which period it covers and whose name it carries, in English that keeps the original’s own labels. For a file that an officer reads against a checklist, that is most of the battle.

If you are putting together a similar set, our main page on certified and notarised translations for ICA submissions sets out the services we offer across PR, citizenship and long-term pass files.

What Malaysian PR applicants ask about LHDN tax paperwork

The checklist mentions three years of income tax assessments. Which of my Malaysian documents are those?

That depends on what LHDN issued to you and on what ICA asks for in your case. We can tell you what each of your documents is, whether a return, an employer’s remuneration statement or a letter from LHDN, and the translation will name it accurately. Which ones satisfy a checklist line is for you to decide against ICA’s current guidance, or to ask ICA directly.

My returns were filed online. Can a printout be translated?

Yes. A printout of an e-filed return, or a system confirmation, can be translated like any other page. The translation will describe it as what it is. If it is a confirmation page rather than the full return, the English heading will say so.

Will the translation say “tax year” or “year of assessment”?

It follows the original. Malaysian forms use Tahun Taksiran, which we render as “Year of Assessment”, with the year exactly as printed. We do not convert it into a filing year or a calendar-year description, because that would be interpretation rather than translation.

Some of my payslips are partly in English. Do I still need the whole page translated?

Generally, yes, if any of the content is in Malay. A partial translation leaves the officer unsure what the rest says. English lines are reproduced as they stand and marked as originally in English, so the translated page matches the original from top to bottom.

Will you tell me if a payslip month or a tax year seems to be missing?

If you tell us which periods you are trying to cover, we will point out an obvious gap in what you uploaded, such as a missing month in a run of payslips. We cannot say whether the gap matters for your application. That is a question for ICA’s checklist and, if needed, for ICA.

Do I have to notarise every document for an ICA PR application?

Not necessarily. ICA’s guidance lists several accepted routes for official translations, including embassy translations, notary translations and private translations that are attested or notarised. Many applicants choose notarisation because it is a straightforward route in Singapore. Check the current guidance for your own application before you decide.

If your bundle looks like this one, the fastest way to a firm answer is to send us the actual pages. Use our translation quote request form to upload each document as its own file, note the periods you need to cover, and tell us whether you want notarisation. We will confirm the scope before any work starts.

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admin Certified Translation Team, ICA Translations Singapore

Our team has prepared certified translations for ICA, MOM and ROM submissions since 2010. Every article here is written and reviewed by the people who handle these documents every day.