Important tax deadline hitting this month – what you need to know
This month marks the close of the tax filing season for individual taxpayers, and missing this crucial deadline could lead to significant financial penalties.
The tax season, which began in July, will officially end on 21 October 2024 for non-provisional individual taxpayers.
The key dates for the 2024 tax season are as follows:
- Auto-assessment notices: 1 – 14 July 2024
- Individual taxpayers (non-provisional): 15 July 2024 – 21 October 2024
- Provisional taxpayers: 15 July 2024 – 20 January 2025
- Trusts: 16 September 2024 – 20 January 2025
BusinessTech spoke to Robyn Gilbert, the Individual Tax Team Manager at Tax Consulting South Africa, to hear what this deadline means for individual taxpayers and what some of the biggest hurdles were during the 2024 tax season.
Gilbert cautioned that taxpayers should be careful not to miss the deadline, as doing so could result in SARS imposing fines and penalties.
“Failing to meet the 21 October deadline can result in penalties imposed by the South African Revenue Service (SARS).
“Taxpayers who miss the deadline are subject to administrative penalties that accumulate the longer the return is outstanding.”
The penalties can range from R250 to R16,000 per month, depending on the taxpayer’s circumstances and the number of returns outstanding.
For many, this year’s tax season may have felt more streamlined and efficient. However, several challenges still emerged during the 2024 filing period.
As this filing season comes to an end, Gilbert explained that a number of issues affected taxpayers in the last few months.
This includes difficulties with SARS’ auto-assessments. Despite the tax body’s “heightened third-party data system, some taxpayers found that the data used by SARS was inaccurate or incomplete”.
Some people also struggled to access the eFiling platform “due to intermittent downtime, especially around the introduction of the two-pot retirement system on 1 September 2024.”
This change caused delays in issuing tax directives and processing older tax returns (those over five years old).
SARS’ verification process also caused problems during this year’s tax season, Gilbert added.
“In general, SARS’ heightened scrutiny means that taxpayers with claims requiring additional documentation face delays in the verification process, which slows down the finalisation of their tax returns.”
However, she said that “despite these challenges, SARS’ efforts to tighten compliance and improve the system have proven to be useful in maintaining tax integrity across the board.”
Warning from SARS
Apart from these hurdles, SARS has also warned that taxpayers should watch out for email and SMS scams which are prevalent during tax season.
“In the run-up to filing season, there will be many attempts from scammers to mimic what we do and try and get your personal details, or to pay money into an account,” SARS said.
“Examples include emails that appear to be from [email protected] or [email protected] indicating that taxpayers are eligible to receive tax refunds.”
“These emails contain links to false forms and fake websites made to look like the ‘real thing’, but with the aim of fooling people into entering personal information such as bank account details which the criminals then extract and use fraudulently.”
Listed below is the advice SARS has for individuals on how they can avoid these scams.
- Do not open or respond to emails from unknown sources.
- Beware of emails that ask for personal, tax, banking and eFiling details (login credentials, passwords, pins, credit/debit card information, etc.).
- SARS will never request your banking details in any communication that you receive via post, email, or SMS. However, for the purpose of telephonic engagement and authentication purposes, SARS will verify your personal details. Importantly, SARS will not send you any hyperlinks to other websites – even those of banks.
- Beware of false SMSs.
- SARS does not send *.htm or *.html attachments.
- SARS will never ask for your credit card details.
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