Individual taxpayers have three weeks less to file this year

THE South African Revenue Service has reduced the length of tax filing season by three weeks.

SARS said the three weeks between the closing of filing season and the start of the December holidays would allow it to conduct audits and verifications.

SARS has held a meeting with recognised controlling bodies such as the South African Institute of Tax Professionals (Sait), the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (Saica) and the SA Institute of Professional Accountants (Saipa) to explore the possible change.

The change will affect mainly non-provisional individual taxpayers who earn a salary and do not have additional income sources such as interest or rental income.

Those non-provisional taxpayers who have filed manually will now have from July 1 2018 to September 21 to file their returns. The final deadline for non-provisional taxpayers is October 31.

Sait tax technical adviser Malebo Moloto said a shortened filing season would affect particularly small to mediumsized practices whose client base included mainly non-provisional taxpayers, as well as clients with value added tax (VAT), employer annual reconciliation and other non-tax deadlines. The annual filing of submissions stretches from July til the end of January.