SARS Submissions due 29 October 2010

[Pastel Payroll Consultant]

There are 14 days left to get your bi-annual submissions in to SARS.

http://www.sars.gov.za/

Remeber that even though you need to submit your tax certificates to SARS along with your PAYE recon, you do not need to give the IRP5s to your staff.

[Dave A]

This interim recon seems to be a monumental waste of productive business time in my opinion.

Remember that even though you need to submit your tax certificates to SARS along with your PAYE recon, you do not need to give the IRP5s to your staff.

Just what is the point in doing this recon? Have the annual returns revealed such massive discrepancies that it's worth the cost to business to be doing the excercise twice a year now?

[brown]

I totally agree with you Dave... SARS keeps saying it wants to make people's lives easier, but each time they come with an ingenious plan to add more to our administration as employers.

I think the logic behind though is to squeeze more money out of us as the extra penalties (likely) imposed means more revenue to the taxman

[Pastel Payroll Consultant]

Hi guys,

I found an interesting response by SARS on moneywebtax.co.za

Sars's reasoning for the biannual returns:
Mark Kingon, group executive of business systems at Sars, revealed to MoneywebTax that the biannual return was introduced to help Sars know its clients better, to track the movement of employees, to prevent fraud and ensure less errors in the final reconciliation. It will also help Sars prepare for the wage subsidy, should it ever come into existence.

Sars is hoping to prevent employers from deducting PAYE and using it for cash flow, instead of paying it over to the receiver, says Kingon.

"It will help us to check that what is actually deducted from staff is actually paid over to Sars".

http://www.moneywebtax.co.za/moneywebtax/view/moneywebtax/en/page262?oid=52544&sn=Detail

[Dave A]

Sars is hoping to prevent employers from deducting PAYE and using it for cash flow, instead of paying it over to the receiver, says Kingon.

"It will help us to check that what is actually deducted from staff is actually paid over to Sars".

That much is obvious

But it doesn't really answer the question, does it?

Is the value involved sufficient to justify every employer in the country having to incur the associated expense (make no mistake - time is money)?

Is there no other way SARS could detect this sort of misbehaviour and then do an audit on potential suspects? By examining patterns in the monthly returns, for example?

It's so easy to spend other people's money and waste other people's time

My suggestion - let SARS provide an online or desktop payroll management package - on the house for all registered employers. And it can talk to SARS like eFiling and E@syfile does.

Perfect data monthly and everyone wins - except the payroll package peddlers, but they'll make money building bridges into our accounting software anyway which will probably make up for the "losses."

[Pastel Payroll Consultant]

Hi guys,

We're into the last week of the Interim Submissions season. Ensure that your submissions are completed as soon as possible because trying to do them on Friday is going to be chaos (and SARS does not allow for delays if the eFiling system goes down).

http://www.sars.gov.za/home.asp?pid=56084

[Pastel Payroll Consultant]

There have been numerous calls regarding eFiling timing out or the submission from e@syFile into eFiling taking lots of time. This is because there is a massive amount of traffic to the Filing site with many people leaving the submission to the last minute. My suggestion - try after hours or tomorrow when the traffic is less.

[Dave A]

This is becoming a rather familiar sight

[Dave A]

If anyone is still struggling to submit your recon online, it's not the SARS server - you're probably running Windows Vista or Windows 7, and there's a new kink that wasn't there last time around -

You have to run e@syfile-employer as an administrator to do the submission process!

If that doesn't mean much to you, here's what to do:

1. If you're already in e@syfile-employer, log out and close the application.
2. Now right-click on the e@syfile-employer shortcut and select run as administrator
3. Carry on as normal from there.

To SARS - an error message would have been nice. Or better still, an advisory on the Submit to SARS page.