Does an employer with only Minimum Wage Earners on payroll still file BIR Form 1604-C?

Yes. BIR Form 1604-C and its employee alphalist are required of every employer with compensation payments to report, regardless of whether any tax was actually withheld. An all-MWE workforce means zero tax due on the return, not an exemption from filing it.

Why file a return at all if no tax was withheld?

Because BIR Form 1604-C is an annual information return, not solely a remittance return — it documents who was paid, how much, and why no tax applied, which the BIR needs on record to verify that an employer's MWE classification is actually correct. Revenue Regulations No. 11-2013 requires employers of Minimum Wage Earners to issue BIR Form 2316 for the same reason, even at zero tax due.

What's the penalty for not filing 1604-C just because everyone is exempt?

A missing or late BIR Form 1604-C is treated as a failure to file a required information return under Section 250 of the NIRC, carrying a ₱1,000 penalty per failure, capped at ₱25,000 per calendar year, plus any applicable compromise penalty under RMO No. 7-2015 — the same exposure as if tax had actually been due and unremitted.

Do all-MWE employees still need individual BIR Form 2316 certificates if the alphalist is filed?

Yes. The annual alphalist attached to BIR Form 1604-C does not substitute for each employee's own BIR Form 2316, which must still be issued by January 31. The alphalist is the BIR's consolidated summary; the certificate is the employee's individual proof of compensation and (lack of) withholding.

How does the alphalist show that every employee is a Minimum Wage Earner?

The 1604-C employee alphalist tags each employee as MWE or non-MWE, and a company whose entire workforce qualifies simply has that flag set for every row. The BIR still expects the full set of compensation figures reported per employee — statutory minimum wage, exempt MWE premium pay, and any taxable extras — rather than a blank or summarized filing because the totals happen to be zero.

Does a Company With Only Minimum Wage Earners Still Need to File the BIR Annual Alphalist (1604-C)?

A business whose entire workforce consists of Minimum Wage Earners (MWEs) still must file BIR Form 1604-C and its employee alphalist by January 31 of the following year — the fact that zero income tax was withheld across the whole payroll does not excuse the filing. BIR Form 1604-C is an annual information return, and an employer’s duty to file it is triggered by having employees to report, not by having tax to remit for them.

This is the same confusion that comes up around BIR Form 2316 for individual MWEs — see Minimum Wage Earners and BIR Form 2316: Why Employers Still Must Issue It — applied at the annual-return level instead of the individual-certificate level. For the full 1604-C filing picture, see BIR Annual Alphalist (1604-C, 1604-E, 1604-F), and for common data errors on this specific form, see Common 1604-C Alphalist of Employees Errors.

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Why would anyone assume an all-MWE employer is exempt from filing? #

The assumption is understandable but wrong: a small employer whose staff are all paid the statutory minimum wage sees zero tax withheld every payroll period and reasonably concludes there’s nothing to report at year-end — but “nothing withheld” and “nothing to file” are two different things under BIR rules. Minimum Wage Earners are exempt from income tax on the statutory minimum wage and related MWE premium pay under Republic Act No. 9504’s amendment to NIRC Section 24(A), and Revenue Regulations (RR) No. 11-2013 and RR No. 11-2018 carry that exemption through to withholding. None of that touches the separate obligation to file the annual information return itself.

That distinction matters because BIR Form 1604-C exists to let the BIR verify, on a documented basis, that the exemption was actually applied correctly — not to collect tax. A business that quietly skips the filing because “nobody owed anything” gives the BIR no record against which to confirm that every employee genuinely qualified as an MWE in the first place.

What is the actual filing exposure for skipping it? #

Treating zero tax due as zero filing obligation exposes the employer to the same penalty structure as any other missed information return. A late or missing BIR Form 1604-C is governed by Section 250 of the National Internal Revenue Code (NIRC), which applies regardless of whether tax was actually due on the return:

“In the case of each failure to file an information return, statement or list, or keep any record, or supply any information required by this Code or by the Commissioner on the date prescribed therefor, unless it is shown that such failure is due to reasonable cause and not to willful neglect, there shall be paid, upon notice and demand by the Commissioner, … One thousand pesos (P1,000) for each such failure: Provided, That the aggregate amount to be imposed for all such failures during a calendar year shall not exceed Twenty-five thousand pesos (P25,000).”
— Section 250, National Internal Revenue Code, as amended

This penalty attaches to the failure to file an information return, not to unpaid tax — which is exactly why an all-MWE employer with ₱0 tax due is still exposed to it. A pattern of skipping the filing across multiple years is also treated by the BIR as closer to willful than to oversight, which can escalate exposure beyond the straightforward civil penalty.

How does an all-MWE alphalist actually look when filed? #

The 1604-C alphalist for an all-MWE employer is filled out completely, the same as for any other employer — it just has the MWE flag checked on every row and zero in every taxable-compensation and tax-withheld column. It is not submitted blank, summarized into one line, or skipped as “not applicable.”

Alphalist field	All-MWE employer’s entry
Employee name, TIN, address	Reported for every employee, same as always
MWE flag	“Yes” for every row
Statutory minimum wage	Full annual SMW amount per employee
MWE premium pay (holiday, overtime, night differential, hazard)	Reported in the exempt compensation column
Taxable compensation	₱0.00 (unless an employee received a taxable extra, such as a commission)
Tax withheld	₱0.00

Filling in actual peso figures against a zero tax-due outcome is the point — it gives the BIR a complete, auditable record showing exactly how the exemption applied to each employee, rather than an unexplained gap in the employer’s filing history.

Worked example: a 12-employee sari-sari distribution business #

Tagaytay Fresh Goods Distribution employs 12 warehouse and delivery staff, all paid exactly the Cavite statutory minimum wage with no employee earning above it or receiving commissions. Every payroll period all year shows ₱0 withholding tax.

Come January, the owner’s informal bookkeeper assumes “we didn’t withhold anything all year, so there’s nothing to file” and skips both the individual BIR Form 2316 certificates and the BIR Form 1604-C alphalist. Two years later, a BIR compliance check flags the employer for two consecutive years of missing annual information returns — triggering the Section 250 penalty for each year, now compounded by the willfulness inference from the repeated omission, on top of having to reconstruct two years of payroll data retroactively to file late. Filing the ₱0-tax-due 1604-C on time each year, by contrast, would have cost nothing beyond the preparation effort and left a clean compliance record.

Summary #

BIR Form 1604-C is required of every employer with compensation to report, and an entirely Minimum Wage Earner workforce changes the numbers on the form to zero — it does not remove the obligation to file it. Section 250 of the NIRC penalizes the failure to file an information return on its own terms, independent of tax due, so treating an all-MWE payroll as “nothing to file” is a filing-history gap waiting to surface at the worst possible time, typically during a BIR review years later. File the alphalist with the MWE flags and zero figures filled in correctly, and issue each employee’s BIR Form 2316 alongside it, every year, regardless of how much tax it reports.