Dear fellow tax payer

Firstly, a big thanks to all of you who attended the Ultimate Tax Survival Workshop!

We had a great response; it was a huge success and you can definitely look forward to more of them in the future. You should keep your diaries free in March next year! We plan to have the next one to coincide nicely with the budget speech.

I personally found the workshop highly informative. For those of you who couldn’t make it, here’s just a taste of what you missed…

I really liked what Jerry Botha had to say about the “state of the nation”. He spoke generally about the numerous changes in legislation over the past few years and the problem with interpretation of these amendments. Sometimes, the changes are complicated and don’t have the desired effect. So when you  interpret the legal mumbo jumbo, make sure you look at the proposed purpose of the legislation rather than the complicated wording.

The ‘mischief’ rule

“In my opinion the man in the street would be at least as perplexed by the language used by the Legislature as is the man on the Bench who is writing this judgement.”

The problem with the Courts is that they’ve started to agree with the SARS’ mindset that everyone is trying to cheat them. For this reason, you must be conservative when it comes to tax planning. Jerry gave everyone a useful 102-point business checklist, travel comparison calculator and had some practical tips to do just this!

There was a lot of discussion around travel allowances and logbooks: as from March next year you’ll have to keep a logbook.

Peter Franck used to work for SARS and he had a lot of insight into its mindset. According to Peter, 79% of employers don’t have clear HR policies, e.g. with regard to travel, subsistence and retirement. This means that 79% of companies risk being audited, as SARS looks for weaknesses.

When it comes to SARS, no news is good news! If your ducks are in all in a neat row, then SARS will assume that it can’t make money from you and you'll escape a potentially time-consuming and expensive audit.

Regards

The Tax Team
Publishers of the Practical Tax Handbook