What is WPS?

UAE Government launches wage protection system for workers

The UAE government on Tuesday launched the much-awaited Wages Protection System (WPS), which is set to benefit over 4 million employees. Published: 14:11 May 26, 2009 - Gulf News

As per UAE Ministry of Labour Decree 788 of 2009 all business institutions registered with Ministry of Labour (MOL) in UAE should transfer salaries of all their employees through Wages Protection System (WPS) on the due date. Ministry of Labour has set out the following guidelines for all such business to be compliant with WPS. Employers can view the Decree on http://mol.gov.ae/WPSGuidelineENG.aspx

Wages Protection System (WPS) is an electronic salary transfer system that allows institutions to pay workers wages via banks, exchange houses, and financial institutions approved and authorized to provide the service.

The system, developed by the Central Bank of the UAE, allows the Ministry of Labour to create a database that records wage payments in the private sector to guarantee the timely and full payment of agreed-upon wages.

The WPS covers all institutions registered with the Ministry across all sectors and industries and will benefit different categories of labour

Consequences of failing to join WPS

Institutions failing to transfer workers' wages by the deadlines specified above will be denied the right to have new work permits. This ban will only be lifted in the month following the transfer of workers' wages in full.

Institutions that delay wages payment more than one month of the due date will be denied the right to have new work permits, along with all institutions owned by the owner of the violating institution, and to refer all those responsible for the violation to the court, in accordance with Ministerial Resolution No. 788 of 2009.

In order to participate in WPS every employer has to first generate salary information file (SIF) of all employees in a specific format mandated by MOL and then send this file along with salary amount through your bank in order to process it through WPS.

Features of WPS Corporate 

• Database will maintain information of your company, bank, employees, salaries, departments, etc.
• Auto Validation of all key fields entered by the user.
• Cross verification for any duplicate entries.
• Payroll system wherein salaries can be processed every month in a single click.
• Generates 'Pay slips' for each employee.
• Option for processing payroll any number of times in a month, based on the salary days of the employees.
• Auto generation of 'Salary information file (SIF)'.
• Facility to re-generate SIF file.
• 'Document Tracking' feature which will generate alerts based on the expiry of legal documents like passport, visa, etc for both employer and employee.
• Option for auto calculation of salary based on unpaid leaves taken by the employee.
• Provision to input different types of salary components, like basic, HRA, conveyance, etc.
• Provision to input different types of deductions, like Loan, HR deduction, telephone, insurance premium & other deductions.
• Can maintain employee data e.g., date of joining, designation, passport, labour card & visa details
• Database information can be retrieved at any point using different reports. All reports can be exported to excel and PDF.
• Provides a backup facility which maintains a copy of the database in order to avoid loss of critical data.
• Existing payroll output file(Excel file) can be easily converted to SIF file and during conversion system does all mandatory validations.