According to the South African Revenue Service (SARS), taxpayers will be able to file their tax returns from 1 July 2022.

Key deadline dates that taxpayers should be aware of, according to SARS, include the following deadlines:

• Individuals and trusts need to file on or before October 24 2022, if the return is submitted manually or with the help of a SARS officer at one of SARS’s offices, or if a non-provisional taxpayer is filing using SARS’s eFiling platform;

• Provisional taxpayers who use eFiling must file by 23  January 2023.

Taxpayers should take note of the shortened deadlines for filing and begin preparing for these submissions as soon as possible.

Based on third-party data obtained from employers, financial institutions, medical schemes, and retirement fund administrators, SARS will continue to auto-assess people in the auto-assessment population. SARS will send an SMS to these taxpayers informing them that they have a tax return pre-populated by SARS on eFiling or the SARS MobiApp.

If they are individual non-provisional taxpayers, they must ‘accept’ or ‘modify’ and submit the auto-assessments by 24 October 2022. It noted that the 2022 filing season’s due date is a month sooner than the same due date for the 2021 filing season (23 November 2021).

Auto-assessed individuals who do not accept, edit, or submit their auto-assessments will receive an anticipated assessment from SARS that is not subject to dispute or appeal. It is anticipated that the same auto-assessment penalty regulations that applied in the 2021 filing season will apply in the 2022 filing season.

An individual who disagrees with the estimated assessment has 40 business days from the date of the estimated assessment to file a correct ITR12 tax return. If a return is late, it will be subject to the usual late submission administrative fines and interest. The late submission admin penalty can be imposed monthly for up to 35 months.

The monthly penalty can be extensive and is based on the taxpayer’s assessed loss or taxable income for the year preceding the year being assessed.