Abstract
South African Revenue Services (‘SARS’) provides that taxpayer certainty and ease of compliance are included as part SARS’s strategic objectives. SARS is committed to ensuring operational efficiencies by streamlining its procedures and processes to ensure it makes it easier for taxpayers to comply with their tax obligations. Thus, SARS vowed to transformation and committed to shifting further away from manual operations to automated operations and consequently introduced the concept of electronic filing (‘e-filing’) in 2001.
The implementation of e-filing has proven to be very successful in South Africa. The benefits attributable to e-filing have motivated SARS to extend the functionality and services accommodated on the platform and include the submission of Income Tax returns.
SARS (2021) provides that the electronic submission of Income Tax returns is currently not available to long-term insurance taxpayers due to the five-fund principle. The submission of Income Tax returns by long-term insurers follows a manual approach. This contradicts SARS strategic objective and consequently creates disparity and discrimination amongst taxpayers with the resultant effect of the electronic submission of Income Tax returns not being fully accessible by all taxpayers.
To address this disparity, it is recommended that SARS extends the e-filing functionality of submitting Income Tax returns via e-filing to long-term insurers. This extension will assist in ensuring that SARS achieves their strategic objective of clarity, certainty and ease of compliance.