SARS will be issuing penalties to those employers who miss the submission deadline – which is Sunday 31st October. If you leave the submission to the last moment SARS may only receive your certificates on Monday (1 November) or Tuesday (2 November), which is beyond the deadline – so rather don’t take the chance!
Employers are required to submit bi-annual (i.e. every six months – May and October) returns of employees tax deducted and paid. SARS may impose a penalty for the non-submission of these returns and are getting stricter about this each year.
The penalty is currently calculated based on a percentage of the employees’ tax as calculated for the period covered by the return.
Think about this – for an employer who has deducted tax for thousands of employees the penalty would be quite significant. For non-submission, SARS does not know the value of the tax deducted so the penalty can only be imposed retrospectively.
In this years’ TLAB an amendment was proposed to impose an immediate penalty based on an estimate. The actual penalty can be corrected once the actual employees’ tax deducted is known.
This amendment is designed to encourage employers to submit their returns timeously and thus avoid these penalties, as they could be steep and therefore cause cashflow issues for the employer.
SARS also sent out a further notice around penalties for non-submission of information and how these will be applied. Refer to the below SARS notice for more information:
