It’s time to do your tax return

THE South African Revenue Service’s 2022 Tax Filing Season opened yesterday, July 1. This year, over three million individual nonprovisional taxpayers have been auto-assessed by SARS and will not have to file a tax return if they are satisfied with the outcome.

In a statement released this week, SARS says technology, data, artificial intelligence and algorithms have enabled SARS to make it easy and seamless for most individual taxpayers to comply with their obligations.

“At the same time, technology has also enabled SARS to significantly sharpen its capability to detect non-compliance and to make such non-compliance hard and costly. SARS will impose penalties on taxpayers that deliberately attempt to claim impermissible expenses or understate their income as well as administrative non-compliance penalties to those taxpayers that do not adhere to the applicable deadlines of this filing season.”

SARS says that, from July 1, it will communicate directly with taxpayers by SMS and/or email, notifying them of their auto-assessments. If you are satisfied with the auto assessment, you don’t have to do anything further and the process terminates at this point.

However, if you find that there is missing or inaccurate information pertaining to either income or expenses, which may have affected the outcome, it must be declared to SARS within 40 business days of the auto-assessment notification by submitting an updated tax return to SARS.

Non-provisional taxpayers who do not receive an auto-assessment and who are required to file a return must do so by October 24. Provisional taxpayers have until January 23 to file their returns.

Taxpayers are urged to wait for the email and SMS and not to visit SARS branches during the first week of July.