Ensuring Fairness
The Office of the Tax Ombud (OTO) today, 1 October 2024, launches its annual awareness campaign themed “Be A Smart Taxpayer”. The campaign aims to empower taxpayers to be smart, promote taxpayer rights and embrace tax compliance. It also serves to maximise awareness about the OTO brand and encourage taxpayers to utilise the free services […]
The Office of the Tax Ombud (OTO) confirms that it has sought and obtained approval from the Minister of Finance to conduct a review of possible systemic and emerging issues related to alleged SARS’s service failures in assisting taxpayers with eFiling profile hijacking timeously in terms of section 16(1)(b) of the Tax Administration Act 28 […]
The South African Revenue Service’s (SARS) action of incorrectly invalidating objections is one of the issues raised and addressed in the Tax Ombud’s Systemic Investigation Report (2020), which concluded that there was a 31% error rate where objections were incorrectly invalidated for various reasons. The case below illustrates another instance of SARS incorrectly invalidating an objection.
The OTO does not only help speed up the resolution of taxpayer complaints and get the South African Revenue Service (SARS) to pay refunds due, however there are also instances where the OTO secures taxpayers thousands of rands in interest thereon. The case in this issue is an example.
October 2023 marked the OTO’s 10th anniversary, and we are taking our stakeholders down memory lane by publishing this birthday issue. It chronicles our history and 10 years of ensuring fairness, and includes successes and challenges. Through illustrations and words, it tells the rich history of how an idea was converted into an important institution […]
Deregistering as a VAT vendor can be challenging, as the case below illustrates, where the South African Revenue Service (SARS) delayed deregistering a taxpayer’s VAT profile for over a year.