At least 191 000 South Africans have filed their tax returns following the opening of the filing season for provisional and non-provisional taxpayers on Monday, 15 July.

This was revealed by South African Revenue Services Commissioner Edward Kieswetter, who briefed media on Tax Season 2024 on Tuesday.

At least 183 000 of those returns were filed on SARS’ online e-filing and mobile application service, and about 7700 were filed through Taxpayer Service Centres.

‘We anticipate, in total, by round about the 20th of January to have issued approximately eight million assessments for the 2024 tax year alone, and that’s besides prior year tax returns that taxpayers will submit,’ he said.

Some five million of those have already been auto-assessed by the revenue service.

Auto-assessments for an expanded pool of taxpayers ran from 1 -14 July 2024.

Kieswetter said during the first two weeks of July, SARS had more than 16 million digital exchanges with taxpayers, at an average of one million users a day – peaking a
t about 1.9 million interactions when tax season opened on Monday.

‘In total, we serviced over three million transactions across all our channels and over a million views on our website in one day. One hundred percent of taxpayers, who would have submitted their returns [on Monday], have already been assessed, 70% of those were assessed within our own five-second aspiration.

‘We also received 57 000 calls and could unfortunately only service about 15 000 of these due to the length of our calls and our current limited capacity to respond to these calls. Cumulatively, from the 1st of July when auto-assessments were issued, to date, 5.5 million taxpayers have already been assessed… creating possible refunds of R17 billion.

‘Of this, R10 billion has already been paid out. A further R4 billion will be paid out within the next 72 hours unless there is a specific reason why they are being withheld, he said.

Refunds that are withheld could be for the following reasons:

That a taxpayer has prior year outstanding
returns.

A taxpayer’s banking details may not be up to date.

SARS may have detected an inaccuracy.

SARS may have detected a need for further verification.

‘We encourage taxpayers to complete these outstanding checks before enquiring about their refunds and to make sure that their details and all outstanding matters are resolved and updated and then if you are due a refund, you should have no challenge,’ he said.

Source: South African Government News Agency