During a meeting in February 2020, SARS unveiled its plans for the “SARS Vision 2024 PIT” project. Various payroll bodies provided inputs to the SARS Vision 2024 PIT team during this meeting. These inputs highlighted crucial aspects of payroll processing and employment taxes. The goal of these documents was to give SARS a better understanding of different elements of payroll administration, and we engaged in several meetings with SARS to explain the practical challenges of processing PAYE, SDL, UIF, and ETI on a weekly, fortnightly, and monthly basis, as opposed to a relatively simple tax year-end process where all figures are final.
Meeting on 25th January 2023:
Further detail was discussed in a meeting with SARS on January 25th, 2023. SARS has requested that the name of the “SARS Vision 2024 PIT” project, used from February 2020, be changed to “SARS PIT Modernisation.” “PIT” is an abbreviation for “Personal Income Tax” and is a generic term for various forms of taxes for individuals, including PAYE, Provisional tax, and Income tax. It goes without saying that the changes to the administration of PAYE will require not just payroll system development but will also impact payroll service providers directly.
Heads-up for Payroll Suppliers:
At this stage, if the rollout of the Vision 2024 PIT project, which includes monthly tax certificate submissions replacing the current EMP201 filing system, proceeds as planned, payroll suppliers must prepare themselves for significant changes to their payroll systems soon after the start of the 2023/24 tax year.
GreatSoft is ready.
As we have kept a close eye on the PIT project, GreatSoft payroll has already been working on minor changes to their Tax Certificate creation process (Monthly). We are eagerly awaiting the announcement on how SARS is planning to receive the monthly submission file as no communication has been released on this yet.
We suspect an update to the current E@syfile system will be announced to allow for monthly uploads, but SARS has not released anything definitive to support this.
We will send an updated newsletter once more information becomes available.
