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Raft of tax court judgments published on the SARS website consider various interesting issues

Important:

This article is based on tax law for the tax year ending 28 February 2018.

Author: Jerome Brink 

Section 132 of the Tax Administration Act, No 28 of 2011 (TAA) states that a judgment of the tax court dealing with an appeal under the dispute resolution provisions contained in the TAA must be published for general information and, unless the sitting of the tax court was public under certain stipulated circumstances, in a form that does not reveal the taxpayer’s identity. This provision is premised on the right to equality set out in s9 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (Constitution) and specifically s9(1) which states that everyone is equal before the law and has the right to equal protection and benefit of the law.

A number of issues thus arise to the extent that SARS does not publish certain tax court judgments which are in its possession. For instance, SARS may internally circulate all tax court judgments amongst its officials for their benefit, however, taxpayers and their advisers alike will not have possession of such judgments hence creating an imbalance in respect of equality before the law and especially equal protection and benefit of the law. 

Very few tax court judgments have been published on the SARS website during the course of this year, going against the norm since the advent of the TAA. However, on 5 October 2017, SARS published a raft of tax court judgments handed down during the course of this year, the first of which dates back to January. One can only speculate as to why the publication of these judgments were held back until last week, particularly in light of the fact that the tax court found in favour of SARS in seven out of the eleven judgments published. 

Nevertheless, the publication of the 2017 tax court judgments handed down thus far will provide for interesting reading and cover a broad range of issues. Some of the procedural and administrative issues considered by the tax court in the most recent set of judgments include whether the taxpayer was entitled to condonation for the late filing of its appeal in terms of s107(2) of the TAA. 

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This article first appeared on cliffedekkerhofmeyr.com.

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