The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has extended the deadline for employers to file their monthly tax data after its systems experienced glitches and downtime this week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The revenue service said that its systems had been hit with higher-than-expected volumes on Monday and Tuesday this week, leading to some taxpayers’ inability to access their filing profiles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the bulk of the downtime was reported on Monday (7 July), tax practitioners also complained of intermittent issues on Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Wednesday, the system appeared to be stable and operational.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The downtime created havoc for many employers and tax practitioners on the deadline to submit their EMP201s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
EMP201 filings are monthly employee tax declarations by employers that contain payments of Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE), the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) and the Skills Development Levy (SDL).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unfortunately, the filing deadline in July coincided with the launch of the auto assessments for the 2025 tax season, leading to system strain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The submission of the EMP201 form must be done within seven days after the end of the month during which the amounts that were withheld from remuneration paid to employees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tax practitioners expressed frustration at the filing delays, noting concerns that they or employers would be penalised for late filing despite the issues being on SARS’ side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, the tax service allayed these concerns, announcing that the filing deadline would be extended to compensate for the downtime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In terms of section 3 of the Income Tax Act, the commissioner for SARS has the discretionary power to extend the respective due dates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In exercising that discretionary authority, the SARS Commissioner has extended the due date for filing and payment to Monday, 14 July 2025.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe recognise that some employers experienced delays in submitting their monthly EMP201s, and as a result, we will consider not imposing penalties and interest on employers who would otherwise have been compliant,\u201d SARS said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It said that taxpayers are encouraged to submit their EMP201 returns before 14 July to avoid late penalties.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" SARS has extended the deadline for employers to file their monthly tax data after its systems experienced glitches and downtime this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":819272,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11121],"tags":[3246],"class_list":["post-830935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance","tag-sars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830935","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=830935"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":830945,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830935\/revisions\/830945"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/819272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=830935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=830935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=830935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}