Pretoria - The year had scarcely begun when taxpayers were again queueing to resolve errors in their 2009 returns.
The problems relate to returns that were completed at the offices of the South African Revenue Service (Sars).
In September last year Johan Snyman of Pretoria handed his return in the Sars office in Pretoria East. He has a copy of the submitted return as proof.
He received a huge shock when he was informed that the Sars system had no record of his return.
Sars spokesperson Malerato Sekha says such instances are rare and generally related to postal submissions.
But it seems that people who enlisted the aid of Sars have also experienced problems.
Taxpayers have complained of receiving incorrect assessments. Expenses for medical and retirement-annuity contributions, for example, have not been taken into account.
One taxpayer said that he had made at least three visits to the Sars office, and had to resubmit all his original documents.
According to Sars it is impossible to determine how many people have had to re-submit their returns.
With 2008's submission there were similar problems and more than 24 000 taxpayers countrywide had to re-submit their returns.
Problems were also experienced with scanning the original documents electronically into the system.
Sekha says that in 2008 fewer than 1% of all returns submitted were re-submitted.
More than one million taxpayers failed to meet the end of November deadline for electronic submission. According to Sekha this however includes provisional taxpayers who have until February 28 2010.
If these are excluded, 700 000 returns are still outstanding. Because of the holidays at this stage it is not known how many of this number have been submitted, says Sekha.
The Sars 2008/09 annual report indicates that there are 5.5m individual taxpayers, 1.8m companies and more than 392 000 trusts.
Since April last year R11.4bn has been paid out to 1.7m individuals. Another 929 000 individuals' refunds, worth almost R5bn, are currently being processed.
- Sake24.com
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