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SARS will take money owed from defaulters’ bank accounts
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Sanchia Temkin
Business Day
Friday, July 02, 2010
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The South African Revenue Service (SARS) is set to get tough on tax offenders by taking money they owed the taxman out of their bank accounts and by attaching their salaries, SARS commissioner Oupa Magashula warned yesterday.
“We are firing our guns,” Mr Magashula said, adding that he hoped that tax offenders would come forward now before the process began in September.
He was speaking at the launch of the tax-filing season for individuals and trusts at the newly refurbished branch of SARS in Rissik Street, Johannesburg.
Mr Magashula said SARS would be recovering amounts due from agents in control of taxpayers’ assets, such as banks and employers.
Unfortunately, despite the mailing of almost 1- million penalties and reminders to noncompliant taxpayers, “the majority of these recalcitrant taxpayers have failed to remedy their non-compliance” .
In October last year, SARS introduced new penalties for taxpayers who had outstanding returns for many years.
In January SARS issued the first round of penalty notices to about 230000 taxpayers.
Mr Magashula said that since these first penalties were issued, about 20 000 penalty payments had been received to a total value of more than R16m.
Mr Magashula said this tax season SARS was moving towards a “taxpayer-centric approach” in which taxpayers themselves would be given access, through electronic filing, to their own tax affairs. From there, they were able to grant access to a tax practitioner, he said.
SARS had encountered a number of cases regarding noncompliance and taxpayers often insisted they had given all their information to their practitioner who had failed to submit it, he said.
“At the end of the day, taxpayers are liable for meeting their tax obligations and should have a direct relationship with SARS.”
Further, SARS had introduced electronic signature pads which allowed the taxpayer to sign their electronic returns.
This enhanced the security of the system and saved SARS from having to print more than 1- million copies of tax returns of at least two pages, Mr Magashula said.
He said that SARS had become a “world leader” in the growth of electronic submission of tax returns with 93% of all submissions received in the 2009-10 tax year having being received electronically.
Only 270 000 returns were received manually last year.
He said despite the economic downturn, SARS had “bucked the trend” and recorded an increase in taxpayers filing their returns on time from 58% in the 2008-09 tax year to 70% in the 2009-10 tax year.
Further, Mr Magashula said that voluntary tax compliance had grown 21% year on year.
“In part, this helped SARS to collect almost R8bn more in revenue than anticipated (for the financial year),” he said.
Mr Magashula said taxpayers could take advantage of the voluntary disclosure programme between November 1 this year and October 31 next year to disclose their defaults and regularise their affairs.
SARS had already received enquiries from taxpayers, he said.
Kosie Louw, chief officer of legal policy at SARS, said this was tied into the foreign exchange control system. The Reserve Bank released a circular earlier this week offering a voluntary disclosure programme to companies and individuals who had taken money offshore illegally, said Mr Louw.
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