{"id":56535,"date":"2014-04-30T10:11:39","date_gmt":"2014-04-30T08:11:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=56535"},"modified":"2014-04-30T10:11:39","modified_gmt":"2014-04-30T08:11:39","slug":"digital-tax-and-sars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/internet\/56535\/digital-tax-and-sars\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital tax and SARS"},"content":{"rendered":"

People who purchase digital goods and services from South Africa are not in danger of being penalised by the South African Revenue Service (SARS<\/a>) if the seller is not VAT compliant.<\/p>\n

This is according to Gerard Soverall<\/a>, a tax specialist and partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC<\/a>) in South Africa.<\/p>\n

In a webcast arranged by PwC, Soverall said that the onus is on the seller to collect value added tax (VAT) and pay it over to government.<\/p>\n

There is no legal mechanism for SARS to chase the recipient of digital goods or services for tax, Soverall said.<\/p>\n

Asked how companies would be required to determine when to collect South African VAT from a patron, the tax expert said that it would essentially come down to two questions:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Are you a resident of South Africa; and<\/li>\n
  2. Are you making a payment from a South African bank account?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Responding to a question on what SARS might do to companies that elect not to become SA VAT-compliant, Soverall said that they still don\u2019t know how SARS intends to force compliance.<\/p>\n

    He said that, from an international perspective, they know it is an incredibly difficult thing to police.<\/p>\n

    Soverall speculated that perhaps SARS will make use of the lines of communication between the various national treasuries around the world.<\/p>\n

    Something else that might drive larger companies to become compliant is the \u201cshame factor\u201d, Soverall said.<\/p>\n

    He argued that large companies, such as Amazon and Apple, are not likely to walk away from their compliance obligations because of the risk of being \u201ctax-shamed\u201d as they have been on their so-called tax avoidance schemes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    This article first appeared on MyBroadband<\/a><\/h3>\n

    More on digital tax<\/h3>\n

    Digital tax will restrict consumer choice<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

    New digital tax implementation date<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

    Why digital tax is good for South Africa<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

    SA digital tax coming in April<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    People who purchase digital goods and services from South Africa are not in danger of being penalised by SARS if the seller is not VAT compliant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":32548,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9882],"tags":[7839,26,2407,3246],"class_list":["post-56535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-gerard-soverall","tag-headline","tag-pwc","tag-sars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56535","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\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56535"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56537,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56535\/revisions\/56537"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}