It is a legal requirement to submit tax returns to the South African Revenue Services. This includes Income Tax returns and VAT returns. Upon submission of these returns SARS will do an assessment to determine how much is payable to SARS or how much is refundable to the taxpayer. The SARS assessment is often accurate but since it is a computer generated assessment, it does happen that their assessment is incorrect and from experience you will find that in such cases more often than not, their system errors result in the taxpayer paying more than they should even if they were actually due a refund.
In the case of Income Tax refunds, the amount of tax payable to SARS or refundable to the taxpayer is dependent on the total tax paid to SARS in that particular tax period as well as the allowable deductions incurred in that period. Such deductible expenses include medical aid deductions and travel allowance deductions. Please note it is important to make sure that your deductible expenses can be supported by verifiable and authentic documents.
VAT refunds are incurred when the total Input VAT exceeds the total Output VAT with regard to standard rated supplies made and purchases made. In order to submit the VAT returns correctly and determines the correct tax amount payable or refundable you need to know which items are subjected to VAT and at what rate.
Tax consultants can easily identify errors on SARS’ system and also compute the correct tax amount payable or refundable at SARS. These are part of the services which are offered at PATC so contact us today if you have a tax refund query.
