SARS announces more tax return changes for 2025
The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has announced several changes for individual taxpayers who are yet to file their Income Tax Return (ITR12) for the 2025 tax season.
Following several adjustments and niggles in the system since the filing season opened in July, the tax service has ironed out the process.
This includes ensuring the appropriate source codes appear in the correct places and making it clearer where foreign nationals can request their appropriate filing documents.
The latter change follows some confusion around which parts of a tax return non-residents are supposed to complete, with the required sections not activating during filing.
SARS has now implemented an “interim solution” to activate this part of the tax return, introduced via the SARS Online Query System.
Non-resident taxpayers can request the non-resident section of the tax return. A more permanent solution directly on the tax return through the tax return ‘wizard’ will be introduced later, SARS said.
More information on what non-residents can do and what qualifies for tax can be found here.
The new changes that SARS has introduced are as follows:
- Antedated salary/pension – From the 2025 year of assessment onward, if source code 3623/3673 (for ‘antedated salary/pension’ paid for past years of assessment) is completed in the income section of the IRP5 certificate, the directive number will be mandatory.
- Exempt Local Dividends – Source code 4306 will only display next to the ‘Exempt Local Dividends’ field from the 2025 year of assessment onwards
- Exempt Foreign Dividends – Source code 4307 will only display next to the ‘Exempt Foreign Dividends’ field from the 2025 year of assessment onwards
- Capital Gains Tax – if a taxpayer is in a partnership and there was a disposal of partnership assets during the year of assessment, the taxpayer is only required to declare his/her own portion of the proceeds and base cost on the ITR12 tax return.
- Return Type for Foreign Nationals – A system change was implemented to issue a ‘resident’ ITR12 by default to all taxpayers classified as foreign nationals. If a foreign national requires a “non-resident” ITR12 return to be issued, the Non-resident Tax Return Type icon on the SARS Online Query System (SOQS) function must be used to request SARS to issue the correct return type for completion.
Filing season is about a third of the way complete, with non-provisional taxpayers having until 20 October to complete their tax returns for the year before facing penalties.
SARS issues new scam warning
In addition to announcing the above changes, SARS has also alerted taxpayers to a new scam doing the rounds.
The scam is one of many that fall under phishing, but follows a new format where the fraudsters are alerting taxpayers to a letter from SARS that needs to be processed.
The latest scam is an email from an address similar to what SARS is using for eFiling notifications i.e. [email protected].
The subject line of the email is ‘PROCESS QUOTE LETTER’ and it asks the recipient to ‘Please kindly process SARS letter for attention’ linking to a fraudulent website.
SARS urged any recipients to avoid clicking the link in the email, and to “hover over the link” to see whether it’s a strange website name.
The taxman said that this is the latest in a host of different types of ways scammers try to nail unsuspecting victims.
In more traditional cases, users are prompted to give their banking details to make payments, compromising their cards and accounts.
Some of the fraudulent messages and emails that have been doing the rounds focus on these areas:
- Threats of SARS issuing court summonses against taxpayers
- Threats of SARS blacklisting taxpayers
- Threats of SARS issuing stop orders on accounts
- Notice of outstanding amounts owed to taxpayers
- Notice of outstanding amounts owed to SARS
- Notice of delayed payments pending FICA review
- Alerts of pending or active SARS audits
- Latest: Request to process letters from SARS
SARS has repeatedly warned taxpayers to be on the lookout for suspicious activity and to report any suspected phishing attempts.
Taxpayers are urged to note the following:
- 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 you receive via post, email, or SMS. However, for the purpose of telephonic engagement and authentication, SARS will verify your personal details.
- SARS will not send you hyperlinks to other websites—even those of banks.
- Beware of false SMSes.
- SARS does not send *.htm or *.html attachments.
- SARS will never ask for your credit card details.
Examples of these scams can be seen on SARS’ scams page. To report or to get more information on phishing, please send an email to [email protected].
Loading ...