SARS announces tax return changes

The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has implemented an update for taxpayers looking to regularise their old tax returns. For returns older than five years, taxpayers can now skip mandatory branch filing.

Ahead of the 2024 tax season, tax practitioners flagged a fresh “curveball” thrown by SARS, where the revenue service disallowed the digital filing of tax returns older than five years.

This meant that taxpayers and practitioners could not file old returns on the SARS mobiApp or eFiling and were forced to book an appointment to file these returns in-branch.

However, this presented a huge issue for many taxpayers looking to become compliant, as the call centres were backlogged with bookings, and the earliest appointment they could get was in August.

The move was met with widespread confusion by tax practitioners, especially because there was no explanation for the change.

Tax experts said this was a big step backwards for the revenue service, which has spent the last few years trying to make tax compliance easier by pushing taxpayers and tax practitioners towards its digital channels and using AI and machine learning to automate simpler tax processes.

“On the one hand, SARS is trying so hard to enforce voluntary compliance and even forced compliance via their Auto-Assessment system, but in the same breath, they are now preventing people from becoming compliant in a relatively simple manner,” said Andre Bothma, founder of the tax firm Irhafu.

“Submitting a tax return on eFiling is no different to submitting a tax return at the branch. The assessment process remains the same. The verification process remains the same.”

The changes

SARS said it had received the message loud and clear.

SARS has now implemented a change where tax practitioners can “reconfirm their status on eFiling” before attempting to request these older returns.

“Once their status has been successfully reconfirmed, tax practitioners may proceed with these requests or submissions,” SARS said.

Additionally, SARS noted that tax administrators linked to tax practitioners are currently unable to request or submit old returns, placing an undue burden on the tax practitioners.

“In response, SARS has implemented a change allowing tax administrators linked to tax practitioners to request or submit returns older than five years,” it said.

SARS refunds

More good news for taxpayers is that SARS expects to clear the last of the revoked tax refunds on Monday (29 July).

Last week, around 30,000 taxpayers were paid their tax refunds only to have them reversed minutes later.

According to SARS, this had to do with a validation process.

Due to the risk associated with the validity of refund payments, all refunds go through the validation process with all stakeholders in the tax ecosystem. These validations could result in refunds being flagged for verification, it said.

Around 90% of the reversals were cleared on Friday, 26 July. The remaining 10%, SARS said, would either be released by Monday, or the affected taxpayers would be “engaged” to provide supporting documents where necessary for the funds to be released.

“These are the normal processes in the validations of refunds. Notwithstanding the above challenges, SARS has, in line with its earlier commitment, paid out 83% of all refunds within 72 hours,” it said.

Since the beginning of the Filing Season, SARS has paid out in excess of R14 Billion to 1.5 million taxpayers.

For those taxpayers who have not yet filed their tax returns, there is still time. Tax season for individual taxpayers closes on 21 October 2024. For provisional taxpayers, the window is open until 20 January 2025.

Key filing dates

Read: Good news for SARS tax refunds