Discontinuation of Debit Pull Transactions on eFiling

[CLIVE-TRIANGLE]

Besides this regime's propensity for fixing things that are not broken, I cant help wondering "why"? Does anyone perhaps know how it affects bank charges?

I received an interesting take this morning:
"A question was posed as to whether accepting the "terms and conditions" as you mentioned is not perhaps impossible to do by tax practitioners as you have to be a legal party to the bank account in order to do this and as a tax practitioner, you do not have signing powers on your clients' bank accounts and by selecting the debit pull option without signing powers, you could be committing a criminal offence. Is this understanding correct? Further problems with this proposed change are as follows:
• It is not possible to implement in respect of tall taxpayers particularly those who do not do electronic banking or have no access to the internet (such as farmers and fishermen who may be at sea).
• Practitioners appointed to submit and pay for taxes cannot access the client's bank accounts.
• Clients use practitioners to have payments made on time. What if client is not contactable to authorise payment?
• Employees in a company responsible for payment of eg PAYE do not necessarily have access to the bank account to release payments.
In addition, there is also a problem with the requirement that tax practitioners need to all get a USER ID for a credit push instead of the old method of debit pulls. Further details on this would be appreciated as on phoning Standard bank for this it was established that they do not issue these User IDs to non - business banking clients. So the questions is what are all the individuals going to do who use normal banking? These changes are thus causing major problems for tax practitioners and will definitely cause lots of penalties to be incurred. Your guidance and advise us on the way forward would be greatly appreciated".

[Wildsniper911]

This is SARS's reason for scrapping the Debit Pull

What are the problems associated with Debit Pull?

1. The risks are that the payment is not guaranteed and can be reversed at the request of the client and can also be rejected due to insufficient funds.

2. SARS is unable to validate that the person authorising SARS to initiate the debit pull is mandated to do so which can result in payments being withdrawn from incorrect accounts. SARS could be placed at risk as a result of such unauthorised actions. Importantly it is in the interest of the client to not allow unauthorised withdrawals from their accounts.

Reason 1: I do understand their concerns, but so what if the payments are not guaranteed and reversed by the client. The client is levied with a penalty as punishment for being late anyway, I don't believe this is going to encourage people to pay tax on time or more readily.

Reason 2: I do believe it is not SARS's responsibility to ensure payments are made by an authorised person and if it is withdrawn from the correct account. I am not sure what Risk SARS has in this matter I do believe the tax practitioner or taxpayer will be liable for this mistake?

I always make sure that the clients are informed of the amounts of VAT,PAYE or Income Tax that will be paid over and I always verify with them if the bank accounts did not change.

I think you're still OK paying at the end of the month as long as you're filing your return via eFiling. As I recall it's the manual returns that have to be in and paid for by the 25th.

Thank you for clarifying

[Julieann]

Does anybody know what the 'access number' is that is required on the credit push?

[Dave A]

1. The risks are that the payment is not guaranteed and can be reversed at the request of the client and can also be rejected due to insufficient funds.

Tough shyte - just like it is for the rest of us

2. SARS is unable to validate that the person authorising SARS to initiate the debit pull is mandated to do so which can result in payments being withdrawn from incorrect accounts.

Another "welcome to the real world" reality for any company that accepts a signed debit order from a client - certainly not a risk that can't be reasonably mitigated by the king of documentation and red tape, surely.

And if someone commits wilful fraud - nail the bastard. You know who your clients are, don't you?
If SARS can't do it, no-one can.

Ultimately, why go extreme on everyone for a few rogue operators?
Which frankly applies to a lot of what SARS has implemented of late. Take registering for VAT as an example.

[J7J]

Hi,

I wanted to do a VAT payment for a client tonight and when I got to the Payment Details screen on e-filing and proceeded to select the bank account name, I got a window with a message that the Debit Pull payment method is no longer available on eFiling and that I must proceed to set up the Credit Push payment option. (it seems like you can use the debit pull payment method for one month longer, if you are the legally authorised party to this bank account - which I am not sure if I am? Am a the legally authorised party to this bank account if I am acting as tax practitioner for a client?)

I am a tax practitioner, which does tax returns on behalf of my clients on eFiling. To setup the Credit Push payment option (this specific client uses ABSA Internet Banking), it seems like I need some of their internet banking login details (like the pin number). I don't think my client is going to like giving me some of their internet banking login details to set this up on eFiling. I don't even now whether this is what eFiling is asking for, as they are asking for Account Number, Access Number (are they asking for the pin here?) and user number...

If I can successfully set up the Credit Push payment option, it seems like the client needs to log in to their ABSA Internet banking and authorise this payment. How does this work on the standard ABSA internet banking?

Am I understanding this message correctly? Anyone else in the same situation?

Please help!

[Dave A]

Am a the legally authorised party to this bank account if I am acting as tax practitioner for a client?)

Pretty safe to say if the bank doesn't hold a mandate with you as an authorised signatory or online user, you're not a legally authorised party to the bank account.

I don't even now whether this is what eFiling is asking for, as they are asking for Account Number, Access Number (are they asking for the pin here?) and user number...

Pretty safe to say they're not looking for the user's PIN too. That would be beyond unreasonable, even by SARS's standards.

As for how it works, I suggest go to this page at SARS, then scroll down past the "why SARS is causing this misery" piece to the buttons below.

Clicking on each provides additional information, such as how to set things up on efiling, and what to do from the online banking service side of things
(with varying degrees of success - or as in my case - the useful information that the credit push option simply doesn't work with Standard Bank internet banking as yet).

The ABSA instructions look rather cryptic, but I'm not familiar with the product. Maybe it'll make sense to an ABSA account holder.

Good luck!

And if anyone gets it right, maybe make a post here to fill in the gaps and give everyone else a head start. At this point, as willing as I was to try to blaze a trail, it seems it's not an option for me right now.

[J7J]

Thank you.

If I file the return via e-filing and request that the client does an EFT via internet banking (at the moment, I think this might be the easiest route for now)...

1) Does the client select "SARS - VAT" (or something of this sort) as the beneficiary for a VAT return payment?
2) Do you just use the return's PRN number as reference to make sure that the payment is allocated correctly? Or is it the PRN number and something else? On the VAT return there is a long reference number next to Payment Reference No. field. Do I use only the number, or do I put PRN in front of it?
3) Anything else that I must tell the client to do when setting up the beneficiary or making the payment for this return?

Thanks!

[Justloadit]

Some of the internet banking systems allow you to set up a user with limited options on your account. One of these options is to allow a specific user to set up payments, or load payments onto the specific account system. This is as far as they can go, no balance check, no transaction check, simply set up a payment request.

The authorized user can now at any time there after log in as he normally would and authorize the payment.

Some people may wonder what is the advantage of this, well if you have multiple regular payments, then you personally do not need to load all the creditors that require payment, but simply authorizing specific payments as you wish, there by saving time.

Maybe the idea here is to set up a internet bank user on your system with limited rights, such as only setting up a payment on a creditor.

[J7J]

So I asked my client to do an EFT for the VAT payment using the pre-loaded beneficiary for SARS - VAT and it asked for an account number and name. It did not accept the PRN number as the account number, so we didn't know what to put in there... So the route I thought was going to work best, wasn't working all that well.

So I set up the Credit Push payment option to try this route. The client uses ABSA Internet Banking. I am happy to report that it seemed to work!

TIP: When setting up the Credit Push payment option, it asked for an access number after the account number. I was not sure what it was, but you can't save the settings without putting something in there. First, I put in a "1" (same as the user number). It accepted this when I saved the settings, but the payment failed. So I went back and changed this to the account number (ie. you put the account number under account number and access number). The payment went through successfully.

The client then logged in onto the ABSA internet banking site and apparently, when you go into payments, there is something for authorisations (with options for VAT, payroll, etc) and she could authorise it from there. I didn't see the screens myself, but I think it was not too difficult to get to the place to authorise this payment. The client could see on her bank that it went off (can't remember for sure now whether it went off as a line on her transaction listing, I think so - but it hasn't gone off her balance...)

On e-filing, this payment is not under Unpaid anymore and under History, it still says Awaiting Authorisation, so I will check tomorrow to see whether it goes off the statement for VAT.

Hopefully the above helps someone else :-)

[nkawit]

I had no problem with credit push. Went into my organization settings, opened the bank account, changed it to push, went to my return, clicked create payment, selected the date, clicked OK.

Went into FNB saw it appeared in enterprise banking under SARS Efiling, clicked authorize.

My staff can issue a credit push too, then schedule an authorizer to authorize in FNB.

Works for me (tm) , plus is easier as I can say yay or nay on FNB side.