Tag: foreign employment

A significant change introduced by the newly gazetted regulations on 20 May 2024, was the implementation of the Remote Work Visa in South Africa. This visa allows individuals employed by foreign companies to work remotely in South Africa. This is similar to the nomad visas now popular in many countries across the globe.

The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has also announced many changes to this upcoming filing season and has already begun auto-assessing taxpayers from 1 July 2023. These changes must be clearly understood by taxpayers, so they can compliantly navigate this year’s filing season.

Whether working abroad or still hunting for jobs overseas, the possibility of a financial emigration always hits centre stage at some point. Tax is inherently complex, but once you start crossing borders it becomes an ever-changing calculation that can easily render void the benefits of earning a foreign income, which was possibly the reason why you chose to work abroad in the first place.

The hotly debated amendment to Section 10(1)(o)(ii) or 'Expatriate Exemption' took effect from 1 March 2020, with the questions on many expatriates’ minds often being 'how will SARS find me? What does the SARS audit of an expatriate look like and what questions should I expect?'

National Treasury and SARS published their responses on the Draft Taxation Laws Amendment Bill (TLAB), which included potential relief for South African expatriates who were unable to leave South Africa owing to the COVID-19 lockdown.

Statistics South Africa (StatSA) released the Community Survey in 2016 noting that a total of 94,760 South Africans have emigrated between 2006 and 2016. A more recent study performed by the Pew Research Centre in February 2018 notes that 900,000 people born in South Africa were living abroad for one year or longer. The top three destinations being United Kingdom, Australia and United States.