Sars turns to payrolls to make up shortfall

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With the pressure mounting on the revenue office to make up the shortfall, it has become more assertive with its collection stratagems and payroll audits seems to be Sars' latest weapon of choice.

Potential honeypot

The simple reason behind targeting payrolls when it comes to extra revenue is purely because of payrolls tend to contain errors. There's also the potential to collect large sums from a single taxpayer.

Mistakes are magnified by the size of the company’s payroll and Sars can, and will, collect any underdeclared taxes from the employer, as opposed to the individual taxpayers themselves.

In the case of a large payroll with many employees, even the smallest errors can leave a company with a large tax exposure, as these errors are proliferated across the employee base.

In other instances, inexperienced payroll administrators simply do not know the law, which results in glaring errors such as failing to tax fringe benefits or paying lump sums without getting tax directives.

The truth is that Sars will find something, and most employers only become fully compliant once they have gone through the ordeal of a payroll audit.

Rising trend

As if the challenges of a payroll audit are not daunting enough, a new trend has become apparent that makes it increasingly difficult to get a clean bill of health from the Sars audit team.

Rather than identifying specific items that were inaccurately treated on payroll, Sars has now turned its gaze to the financial statement aspect of payroll.

These statements are assessed for an understatement or short payment of employees’ tax purely on the basis that there is a discrepancy between the company’s payroll reconciliation and the cost of employment as reflected in the company’s annual financial statements.

This is despite Sars’ awareness that not all amounts reflected in the annual financial statements under cost of employment should be processed to the payroll.

Nevertheless, the onus is placed on companies to dispute this and to explain why the amounts making up the difference is either exempt or not taxable. This is a quarrelsome task, as this effectively equates to finding a needle in a haystack and then proving that it is not subject to tax.