Is your Tax Objection Late? Here’s What to Do

Is your Tax Objection Late? Here’s What to Do

• 15 January 2019
• Tax Administration
• Nico Theron

Important:

This article is based on tax law for the tax year ending 28 February 2019.

SARS raises additional assessments all the time and for various reasons but mostly, an additional assessment, whether it be on VAT, income tax or PAYE is raised by SARS following an audit/verification.

If a taxpayer is not satisfied with the assessment, the taxpayer can object against the additional assessment but has to do so within 30 business days (this 30-day period may change to 60 days sometime in 2019 but as of the date of publishing this article, it is still 30 days). This 30-day deadline is often missed.

Are you dead in the water, so to speak, if you missed this deadline? Well, that depends. If you are more than three years late, then it will be near impossible to get the assessment revised/reversed through the objection process (other remedies may be available under the Tax Administration Act though depending on the facts). Contact us in these cases for expert tax dispute resolution guidance.

If you are not more than three years late, you are still in trouble but not necessarily dead in the water. The level of trouble you are in and whether your case is still salvageable depends in part on whether you are more than 30 days late (i.e. more than 60 days have lapsed since the date of the additional assessment) or less than 30 days late (i.e. less than 60 days have lapsed since the date of assessment).

More than 30 days late is more difficult to get around. In these cases, the taxpayer needs to prove that the cause of the late submission of the objection is the existence of some exceptional circumstance/s before SARS will condone the late objection.  What are ‘exceptional circumstances’? The term has eluded precise definition in our courts but includes things such as “civil disturbances”, “natural or human made disasters”, “serious illness or accident”, “serious emotional or mental distress” and the like.

Please click here to read more.

This article first appeared on unicustax.co.za.

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