16 July 2024 – The Commissioner for the South African Revenue Service (SARS), Mr Edward Kieswetter expresses, his sincere gratitude to all taxpayers who interacted with SARS over the past two weeks. This includes those who were part of the Individual Tax Filing Season 2024 that commenced yesterday, 15 July 2024 and will run until 21 October 2024 and 20 January 2025 for non-provisional and provisional taxpayers, respectively.
Commissioner Kieswetter affirmed that “In line with our strategic intent of developing a tax and Customs system that is based on voluntary compliance, through the synthesis of people, data, and technology, we continue to modernise our systems. We are continuing to work to provide a seamless, empowering and enabling taxpayer experience, where tax eventually just happens for the millions of South Africans. We are deliberate in making the Filing Season a non-event”.
Nearly 150 million third-party data records were harvested this year, which serves as the building block of the Filing Season. Processing this volume of Big Data through the application of artificial intelligence and enhanced machine learning algorithms enables SARS to automatically assess a larger number of taxpayers, pre-populate more returns, improve the integrity of taxpayer declarations, and simplify the taxpayer experience.
