{"id":144915,"date":"2016-11-29T10:57:25","date_gmt":"2016-11-29T08:57:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=144915"},"modified":"2016-11-29T14:20:19","modified_gmt":"2016-11-29T12:20:19","slug":"10-things-you-need-know-about-tax-in-south-africa-in-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/business\/144915\/10-things-you-need-know-about-tax-in-south-africa-in-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"10 things you need know about tax in South Africa in 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>New tax data shows that tax revenue collection for 2015\/16 increased to R1.07 trillion, up by R83.7 billion or 8.5% from the 2014\/15 period.<\/p>\n<p>The report &#8211; Tax Statistics 2016 &#8211;\u00a0 published by the South African Revenue Service (SARS) and National Treasury, showed that there are 19 075 270 individuals registered to pay tax as of March 2016, with 4 788 334 assessed and 6 662 490 expected to pay.<\/p>\n<p>There are 458,048 employers registered with the tax body.<\/p>\n<p>SARS said there were 3.3 million registered companies (of which about 900,000 submit income tax returns) and 706,874 registered Value-Added Tax (VAT) vendors of which 425,225 (60.2%) were active.<\/p>\n<p>The eFiling payments channel constitutes most of the number of payments received by SARS and accounted for 75.9% of the total value of all taxpayer payments in 2015\/16.<\/p>\n<p>The report provides an overview of tax revenue collection and tax return information for the 2011\/12 to 2015\/16 fiscal years, and the 2012 to 2015 tax years respectively.<\/p>\n<p>BusinessTech identified 10 important statistics from the report:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Tax-to-GDP ratio increased from 25.5% in 2014\/15 to 26.2% in 2015\/16, slightly below the peak of 26.4% achieved in 2007\/08.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Revenue growth was mainly supported by personal income tax (PIT), which grew by R35.4 billion (10%).<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>The cost of revenue collection ratio decreased from 0.97% in 2014\/15 to 0.96%, well within the international benchmark of 1%.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Of the 6 662 490 individual taxpayers expected to submit returns for the 2014\/15 tax year, 4 788 334 (71.9%) have been assessed.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>A demographic and geographic analysis shows that 1 920 874 (40.1%) assessed taxpayers were registered in Gauteng.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong> A demographic and geographic analysis shows that 607 092 assessed taxpayers lived in the Johannesburg Metro and were taxed on an average taxable income of R404 430.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>VAT remained the second largest contributor to total tax revenue for 2015\/16, totaling R281.1 billion (26.3% of total tax revenues).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>The main sectors that contributed to domestic VAT growth were financial intermediation, insurance, real-estate &amp; business services; community social &amp; personal services; and construction.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>At 18.1% of total tax revenues, Company Income Tax (CIT) was the third largest contributor to total tax revenue collected in 2015\/16.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Import VAT and Customs Duties, South Africa\u2019s two biggest trade-related taxes, jointly contributed R197 billion (18.4%) to total tax revenue collected in 2015\/16.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Read: <a href=\"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/columns\/129524\/tax-saving-tips-used-by-the-super-rich\/\" target=\"_blank\">Tax saving tips used by the super rich<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The South African Revenue Service (SARS) says it received 5.74 million returns by the close of tax season for non-provisional taxpayers on Friday, 25 November 2016, <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":80497,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9872],"tags":[26,3246],"class_list":["post-144915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-headline","tag-sars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144915"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":145001,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144915\/revisions\/145001"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}