Taxpayers do it electronically
With just one day left, almost half of the country’s registered taxpayers have submitted their returns.
South African Revenue Service spokesman, Adrian Lackay, said out of the 3.8million people who were issued with tax forms, 1.7million had met the October 31 deadline.
Lackay said 600000 people had registered on SARS e-filing system.
“A quarter of that, about 150000, have submitted their forms electronically. So we have close to 1.8 million forms in hand.”
Lackay said people still need to get used to the new forms and the submission process.
“Firstly, we wanted to make it as simple as possible and, secondly, to encourage the use of technology and automation.”
He said the new forms helped to simplify the process so that tax returns could be finalised faster.
Lackay cautioned people to avoid unnecessary mistakes when filling out their forms manually.
“The most common mistake is that people forget to sign their forms and we have to return it to them. People also make unnecessary mistakes and scratch out figures.
“What needs to be remembered is that these forms are scanned into our system and the machine can’t read what you have scratched out. People need to write legibly.”
“People have left it to the last two weeks. There has been overloading of the website and large volumes of traffic.
“Queues at Sars offices nationally are long. It takes between eight and 12 minutes to assist one person, on average.
He said: “We have received 100000 forms per day over the last two weeks, on average.”
The SARS call centre takes about 23 000 to 25 000 calls per day.
Passwords have proven to be the biggest bugbear in Sars e-filing.
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