Tag: Personal Income Tax (PIT)

South African Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana tabled the 25th Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement today, where he emphasised the budget’s focus on navigating the country’s path toward an economic and social recovery.

China’s transition towards 'common prosperity' will create some short to medium-term headwinds to the growth in luxury goods sales, but these should be more than offset by long-term, structural growth in the sector driven by an expanding middle-income cohort in China.

National Treasury has indicated that it will assess the viability of a future wealth tax, as it collects more data in the coming months following the recommendations of the Davis Tax Committee. South African Revenue Service (SARS) will focus on consolidating wealth data for taxpayers through third-party information, Treasury said in its 2021 budget review.

When the minister of finance delivered Budget 2020/21 on 26 February 2020, COVID-19 was mostly contained to China (with other countries registering few cases). The budget therefore made virtually no provision for what was to become one of the largest health and economic meltdowns in the past 90 years. As such, except for the growing fiscal deficit, the main and consolidated budgets[1] contained no earth-shattering announcements.

The President, on 15 January 2021, assented to the Taxation Laws Amendment Act No. 23 of 2020 (TLAA), which was subsequently promulgated on 20 January 2021. Despite the blow back last year on the proposed amendment to the withdrawal of retirement funding in SA based on emigration, this amendment has now been signed into law and will become effective on 1 March 2021.

Over the course of lockdown, pundits have shared some harrowing statistics regarding the increase in unemployment in South Africa. In general, our unemployment rates are moving in the wrong direction and the affected households have suffered great hardship as a result, but it is important to understand what this means for our tax base and our growing budget deficit.

The middle class broadly has been a high level, vigorous and academic marathon in defining and diagnosing. The middle class has always been viewed as the creation of a capitalistic system, leading to defining society in terms of class and wealth.

During August, many South Africans received auto-assessments for their 2019/20 personal income tax returns from SARS. The admin for the tax year is behind the taxpayers that accepted, or amended and submitted, this assessment and settled any tax still owing to SARS.

You may owe SARS money next year if you receive a travel allowance and aren’t travelling for business because of COVID-19. Most employees have travelled less for business this year than they would in the pre-COVID-19 world.

Moody’s finally dropped the sword on South Africa on Friday evening, following in the steps of fellow ratings agencies S&P and Fitch in downgrading the country’s sovereign credit rating to sub-investment grade or 'junk status'. And the COVID-19 crisis and current lockdown mean that even before factoring in the impact of Moody’s decision, the economic outlook for SA in 2020 is harrowing.