Why you shouldn’t use third parties to make SARS payments

The unfortunate reward for being the owner of a successful business or being lucky enough to earn income from multiple streams, is that you more likely than not will have to pay taxes. Fortunately, there are professional Accounting firms, such as Business Services, that can assist you with Tax Management, but not all companies offering accounting and related services are as reputable and trustworthy as you might think.

We recently had a client approach us with quite a significant issue – the “firm” that they entrusted with their taxes also offered SARS payment services, but they never paid a single cent over to SARS and disappeared with the client’s hard-earned money. Now I’m sure a one-stop SARS solution like this does sound like an extremely lucrative option to any taxpayer that wants to deal as little as possible with SARS, but the risk involved greatly outweighs any benefit that you might gain from following this route.

At the end of the day, you as the representative taxpayer of your company or you as an individual, in terms of personal income taxes, remains the party responsible for timely submission and payment of any returns and taxes due to SARS. If you entrust a third party with making payments to SARS and they fail to do so, well, SARS will come knocking on your door and not theirs, but only after they’ve charged a hefty late payment penalty as well. And to correct this will cost you even more time and money as you most likely will have to take legal action against said third party as well as make payment to SARS to maintain your Tax Compliant status and prevent any further penalties and/or interest from accruing on the amount owed to SARS.

Also, on top of being the safer option and providing you with a final control check post return submission, we also believe releasing payments to SARS yourself to be the quicker option. If your bank account is set up correctly on e-Filing, then making payment to SARS is as easy as approving a notification on your banking app after payment has been loaded for the applicable return on e-Filing. Alternatively, you can make a manual EFT payment to SARS (a secure pre-loaded recipient on all major banking platforms), rather than an EFT to the third party that might cost you dearly.

At Business Services we pride ourselves in being reputable and trustworthy professional accountants, but even so to ensure the security of our clients’ finances we do not accept any payments other than the fees that we charge for the services we deliver. We urge all taxpayers to refrain from using third parties to make payments to SARS and rather stick to the above-mentioned payment options that leaves you in control of your money.