Sars confident in auto-assessment system

The SA Revenue Service (Sars) refuted claims of technical glitches in the first few days of the auto-assessment campaign, which kicked off on Friday, saying the system was under pressure to the traffic volumes.

Despite problems with the slow document loading time and missing documents, Tax Consultant SA praised the autoassessment system.

According to Thamsanqa Msiza, of Tax Consulting SA, using information received from third parties, Sars has been preparing tax returns for certain taxpayers for their final review and approval.

However, he said, as with previous tax years, e-Filing always experienced technical errors for each new tax return during the first few weeks of tax season.

“As with any new system, there has been some teething problems. Similarly, Sars has often identified the errors and rectified them. We can only hope Sars will also attend to the problems encountered on the 2020 tax return,” Msiza said.

For Taritha Oosthuizen, a tax consultant, one of the encouraging features of the auto-assessment function was that taxpayers have their income information preloaded on their 2020 tax return.

“This saves the taxpayers the time and effort of preparing the tax return. Unfortunately, where information is incorrect or not relevant, it must be noted the information cannot be corrected or removed.

“Unlike on previous tax returns, it appears the taxpayer will need to approach the relevant third party for assistance,” she said.

Oosthuizen said another issue was that when a taxpayer wished to edit or review their 2020 tax return, they were faced with a never ending loading page. She said this might be caused by a lot of traffic as people try to submit their returns, or the system “proving to be victim of its own success,”

Siphithi Sibeko, Sars spokesperson, said they were confident of the success of the system.

“We expect the system to normalise and go smoothly once the traffic evens out,” Sibeko said.

He said out of more that three million auto-assessment notices issued, they received over 450 000 returns and over 300 000 of these accepted auto-assessment.