SARS pays R10bn in refunds through auto assessments
On Tuesday, the South African Revenue Service said it had already paid R10 billion to 1.6 million taxpayers since the start of the 2024 tax season.
The value of the average refund was around R5,900.
SARS Commissioner Edward Kieswetter took the country through the first day of income tax return submissions for provisional and non-provisional taxpayers.
Tax filing season began on Monday.
Over the past two weeks, more than five million taxpayers received auto assessments, with 99.13% of them accepting the outcome without making any changes.
“We completed these annual returns and tax assessments while simultaneously running each assessment outcome through our compliance risk and tax fraud detection capability,” Kieswetter explained.
"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,” the tax boss added.
By Monday, at least 191,000 returns had been filed, 183,000 of which were filed digitally through eFiling and MobiApp.
Some 7,700 returns were filed at SARS’ various walk-in centres.
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