Let’s help SARS report tax or customs crimes!

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What it that SARS regards as suspicious activity or potential crime?

SARS has made reporting a tax or customs crime easy and simple to encourage the public to help them identify the thieves and hand them the sentence or penalty they deserve.

SARS A suspicious activity would include;

  • A person or business that is eligible for any type of tax but not paying any form of tax.
  • A person or business employs people and deducts PAYE from the employees but not issuing IRP5 certificates to their employees.
  • Imported goods being sold at a price lower than “landed cost” (possibly avoiding VAT)
  • Not submitting the required returns to SARS.
  • A person is living beyond his obvious financial means (possibly having driving a car he normally could not afford or buying a house that someone else in the same income bracket wouldn’t be able to buy)
  • An importer that is found to have not declared goods upon importation on more than one occasion.
  • A person found to carry an unusual large amount of currency in any form whilst travelling into or out of South Africa.
  • A person or business is liable to be registered for VAT but is not.
  • Find the rest of this list here

What do you need to be able to report a crime?

You will need;

  • ID number
  • Tax Reference number of the person you are reporting.
  • Car registration number will help if you don’t have any of the above

How do I report a tax or customs crime?

Step 1:

When you report the crime, the SARS consultant will ask if the crime is related to business tax or personal tax or customs.

Step 2:

You may then decide if you would prefer to remain anonymous and will be asked to fill a form in (the form is available online and is extremely easy to complete).

Step 3:

Remember that you will unfortunately not be kept up to date with the progress of the case as SARS are not able to discuss a person’s tax affairs with anyone else. This doesn’t mean that your contribution is not looked at, your report will be used and investigated by SARS.

“Your information is important to us. Reporting a tax crime is the right thing to do”– SARS

Information sourced from www.sars.gov.za/