Understanding Choice Pay: How to Maximize Tax Benefits in Your Salary Package?

Hello.

I need help regarding salary breakup. The package is 6.5 lakh per annum, of which 2.6 lakh is Basic pay and 3.9 lakh is Choice Pay. What is choice pay? And how can we ask for choice pay with tax benefits?

In the previous company, the gross pay was 40,900, and the net pay to me was 29,415. Rs. 6,000 was deducted as tax. Kindly advise on how to structure the choice pay.

Thanks, Uma.

Hi Uma,

I assume Choice Pay is nothing but what we refer to in our company as flexible pay, which is a part of your total package.

In Flexible Pay, which we term as FBP (Flexible Benefit Plan):

1. We have identified certain components that can be used purely on a reimbursement basis, which means if he needs that money, he needs to produce bills/receipts.

2. The components in FBP that we offer to all our employees are: Food Coupon, Medical, LTA, Telephone, Vehicle Fuel+Driver's Salary, Computer Purchase, Car Lease, etc.

3. All these components are assigned a fixed limit, and there are some components that are exclusive to the manager and above. For example, Computer purchase and Vehicle Fuel cannot be options for a software developer.

4. Employees can either monthly or quarterly submit bills and claim for reimbursement.

5. On all these components, there is an FBT levied and not direct tax. This is indeed a good method whereby employees can minimize tax, especially employees with higher salary incomes.

I hope this piece of information will help.

Let me know if you need more assistance.

Cheers,
Nikita

Hi Nikita,

Thank you very much for your information. To add to this, FBT is 6.6%.

Regards,
Amanpreet Bedi

Hi,

Can someone help me with these questions?

1. Do we need to make any declarations for the FBP component in the annual tax declaration?
2. For example, if my FBP includes a Phone Bill of 24000 annually and Broadband of 24000 annually, and my bills are not 2k per month, how can I claim the total value? If I can't, would that result in a loss of the remaining balance?
3. In the case of a prepaid mobile connection where I don't receive any bills, how should I proceed?

Regards,
Bharath.