{"id":365978,"date":"2020-01-14T08:59:33","date_gmt":"2020-01-14T06:59:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=365978"},"modified":"2020-01-14T09:04:25","modified_gmt":"2020-01-14T07:04:25","slug":"south-africas-new-expat-tax-is-a-scare-tactic-expert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/finance\/365978\/south-africas-new-expat-tax-is-a-scare-tactic-expert\/","title":{"rendered":"South Africa&#8217;s new expat tax &#8216;a scare tactic&#8217;: expert"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thousands of South Africans will be impacted by new amendments to the Income Tax Act which will come into effect from 1 March 2020, says Nicolas Botha, a senior financial emigration specialist at Tax Consulting SA.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking in an interview with <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.capetalk.co.za\/articles\/371809\/earn-most-of-your-money-offshore-you-may-be-facing-some-ex-pat-tax-changes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">702<\/a><\/strong>, Botha said that South African tax residents who render services outside the country on behalf of an employer for longer than 183 full days in any 12-month period can be granted an exemption on their income tax.<\/p>\n<p>However, under the new rules set to be introduced in March, these South African will only receive a break on the first R1 million earned abroad. After this you can be taxed according to South Africa&#8217;s own income tax system, he said.<\/p>\n<p>Botha said that the majority of clients his firm deals with sit within this R1 million-plus bracket, especially as the calculation considers additional benefits such as housing allowances and education.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Treasury cross-referenced South African experts and immigration stats and compared them to compliance with tax returns.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;What they noticed was that there was a vast difference between these immigration stats and people being compliant, so it was almost a bit of a scare tactic to wake up South Africans to correct their returns and get compliant.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Obviously they are also under-budget, and experts earn a lot, so they perhaps want a piece of that pie as well.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Understandably, some expats are aggrieved by this change.<\/p>\n<p>Concerns have been raised that limiting this exemption may increase permanent emigrations from South Africa and have a negative impact on remittances to country, particularly for those with lower incomes working abroad.<\/p>\n<p>National Treasury is, however, firm in its view that the R1 million threshold is already a compromise, and that from a policy perspective the abuse of the exemption by some expats unfairly benefitting from &#8220;double non-taxation&#8221; (i.e. not paying tax in either South Africa or the foreign country in which they work) must be stopped.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>Read: <a href=\"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/finance\/364256\/south-africas-big-expat-tax-is-coming-soon\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">South Africa\u2019s big expat tax is coming soon<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thousands of South Africans will be impacted by new amendments to the Income Tax Act which will come into effect from 1 March 2020, says Nicolas Botha, a senior financial emigration specialist at Tax Consulting SA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":102841,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11121],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-365978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance","tag-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365978","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=365978"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":366004,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365978\/revisions\/366004"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}