How do I recover the employee’s share of CPF contributions?

As an employer, you need to pay both the employer’s and employee’s share of CPF contributions to CPF Board. You are entitled to recover the employee’s share of CPF contributions when paying your employee’s wages for the month. For example, the employee’s share of CPF contributions for January can only be deducted from the employee’s wages in January.

It is a serious offence to recover or attempt to recover any amount more than what is allowed from your employee’s wages.

If you failed to recover the employee’s share of CPF contributions due to your error (e.g. system glitch, omission of CPF contributions due to employer's oversight, wrong computation of employee's share) before paying your employee’s wages for the month, you cannot recover the employee’s share of CPF contributions from subsequent months’ wages.

However, if the failure to do so was not due to your error, you must do the following before you can recover the employee’s share of CPF contributions from wages payable by you to your employee:

• you have paid the CPF contributions to the Board, and
• you have either forwarded your employee’s written consent to CPF Board, or obtained CPF Board’s written permission on the matter.

This must be done within six months from the time the employee’s share of CPF contributions should have been recovered.

This information provided here is sourced from the CPF website.