The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has officially commenced the Individual Tax Filing Season 2024, which began on 15 July 2024. The season will run until 21 October 2024 for non-provisional taxpayers and until 20 January 2025 for provisional taxpayers.
“In line with our strategic intent of developing a tax and Customs system that is based on voluntary compliance, through the synthesis of people, data, and technology, we continue to modernise our systems. We are deliberate in making the Filing Season a non-event," said commissioner for the South African Revenue Service (SARS), Edward Kieswetter.
Nearly 150 million third-party data records were harvested this year, which serves as the building block of the Filing Season.
Processing this volume of big data through the application of artificial intelligence and enhanced machine learning algorithms enables SARS to automatically assess a larger number of taxpayers, pre-populate more returns, improve the integrity of taxpayer declarations, and simplify the taxpayer experience, he said.
In the first 14 days, well over 5 million taxpayers experienced our Auto Assessment, with 99.13% of them accepting the outcome without making any changes. Refunds of about R10 billion to 1.6 million of auto-assessed population have been paid thus far with an average refund of R5900.
“We completed these annual returns and tax assessments while, simultaneously, running each assessment outcome through our compliance risk and tax fraud detection capability. All this is possible because of the investment that we have been able to make in increasing and expanding the use of third-party data in the past few years.
"Last year, this work alone added R100 billion to the fiscus through the prevention of impermissible refunds. Despite these successes, I believe that we can do so much more,” Kieswetter said.
After the opening of Filing Season yesterday, 15 July 2024, 191 000 returns have been filed with 183 000 (9%) filed digitally through eFiling and MobiApp while 7 700 (3%) were filed through our Taxpayer Service Centres, of which 90% were processed within 5 seconds.
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