More and more APIs exposed by Ministries

The trend is pretty clear these days - ministries in Singapore are encouraged to expose more and more APIs for external entities to consume, in particular organizations/companies.

This will save huge amount of human hours if manual tasks like Form Submissions can be automated. Yes, we have a labour crunch here in Singapore. We do not have enough local people in our workforce. Thus automation is key going forward!


My team is currently designing APIs for one of the financial institutions in Singapore. This week, we have a new request to integrate with Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS) for Commission Income Information Submission.

The current process of submission is very manual.

It requires a person to download a program (Offline Validation Program - OVP) from IRAS to validate a XML/Excel file. Once validated, one has to log in via SingPass (Singapore Personal Access) and then manually upload the XML/Excel file to IRAS portal.

The new API service allows applications to directly submit Commission Income Information to IRAS , thus eliminating the need to download and validate using OVP and login to IRAS portal for submission.


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