Filing season now three weeks shorter
The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has shortened the annual tax filing season by three weeks, but has taken steps to prevent its branches from buckling under expected congestion.
SARS says the three weeks between the closing of filing season and the start of the holidays in December will allow it to conduct audits and verifications.
It has met recognised controlling bodies such as the South African Institute of Tax Professionals, the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants and the South African Institute of Professional Accountants ahead of the change.
The move will affect mainly nonprovisional individual taxpayers who earn a salary and do not have additional income sources such as interest or rental income. Nonprovisional taxpayers who have filed manually will now have from July 1 2018 to September 21 to file their returns. The final deadline for nonprovisional taxpayers is October 31.
South African Institute of Tax Professionals tax technical adviser Malebo Moloto said a shortened filing season would affect particularly small to mediumsized practices whose client base included nonprovisional taxpayers, as well as clients with VAT, employer annual reconciliation and other nontax deadlines. The annual filing of submissions starts in July and run until the end of January.
Acting SARS commissioner Mark Kingon said the agency had sent “personalised and direct” communication to taxpayers who might not need to submit a tax return. “Too many people who are not required to file, due to them earning a single source of income from one employer of up to R350,000, are going to a branch.”
Kingon said this clogged up SARS’s systems. It appeared that 1.6-million people who did not need to file a return in 2017 had done so. Another issue draining resources during filing season was the large number of returns filed for prior years.
Kingon said SARS would prioritise returns for the current year of assessment. It wanted to clear the backlog and get people to file their returns on time.
Verification letters, a huge source of frustration for taxpayers and practitioners, would be more specific so that taxpayers knew exactly what supporting documentation to supply.