TAX SEASON SOUTH AFRICA 2015

Investing & Money
piece written on the 1st July 2015 by  

That’s right folks, it’s that time of the year again.. tax season! It’s time to get our affairs in order and I’ve got some bits and pieces to share with you. You should have received an IRP5 from your employer, if not, request one right away. Also, make sure you get a medical aid certificate if you pay your own medical aid, any additional income streams, rental income accounts and tax certificates for any retirement annuities.

To start off, I spoke with the Director of TaxTim, Evan Robinson. TaxTim is an online platform that assists people with doing their taxes. Let’s face it, doing your taxes is quite a hassle and understanding everything is no easy feat. Evan and his partner created the website to help people with this and they’ve gone on to receive funding from Google and now report that they’ve assisted over 1,300,000 South Africans with their tax.

I’ve done my taxes every single year for as long as I can remember. I ended up hiring an accountant to assist me with mine because it worked out cheaper for them to do it in comparison to the time it was going to take me to get everything in order and use e-filing. As much as it frustrates me to think that the tax I pay isn’t going into things that I feel it should be, it’s just how things go and I’m glad that I’m doing things above board.

Evan provided me with 5 reasons to do your tax and I’ve rewritten them slightly:

  1. If you do your taxes correctly, you can get your refund. A refund is money you overpaid on your taxes and it belongs to you. If you don’t do your taxes, you are basically letting SARS keep your money!
  2. Don’t close doors by avoiding your taxes. If you don’t do your taxes and you want a long term loan such as a mortgage loan you’re going to have problems because you’ll need a Tax Clearance Certificate.
  3. If you have been paying tax and you decide not to, SARS have the right to put penalties on your name which could result in problems down the road.
  4. To get money out of a fund or to get your money when you retire or are retrenched, you need to have done your taxes or you can run into some big problems when you’re in a position where you desperately need the money.
  5. Having an unbroken filing record leaves SARS officials with no reason to suspect that you are hiding information from them, thus triggering an audit next year. Filing a tax return means you are being a good citizen and contributing towards society.

Here are some calculators to assist you in figuring out what is what:

Here are some other references you should be looking at if they apply to you:

Here are the important dates:

  • Opening tax season for all taxpayers – 1 July 2015
  • Submission deadline for manual submissions (post or paper) – 30 September 2015
  • Submission deadline for eFilers or in branch – 27 November 2015
  • Submission deadline for provisional taxpayers using eFiling – 29 Jan 2016
    (for people who don’t know if they are provisional, link)

Note: TaxTim did not commission me to write this article.