DON’T JUST CLICK ACCEPT
- 7 hours ago
- 4 min read
Heather Flack, Business Leader, Flair Accounting
SARS auto-assessments open in July. Millions of South Africans will hit ‘accept’ without reading a word. Some of them will regret it.
Last July, a Durban events coordinator received a South African Revenue Service (SARS) notification she had been half-expecting. Her auto-assessment was ready. She opened eFiling on her phone, saw that SARS had calculated a refund of R3,800, and clicked accept. Done in three minutes. She told all who would listen how it was the easiest thing she had done all year.
Later in the year, she approached us for something entirely unrelated – and in scrolling through the return she had accepted, we found: Her home office deduction: not claimed. Her retirement annuity contributions beyond her employer’s submission: missing. A medical expense shortfall of nearly R11,000: nowhere in sight. The refund she had accepted was R3,800. The refund she was actually owed was closer to R21,000. There was no way to go back.
This July, the same scenario will play out for hundreds of thousands of South Africans – including a significant number of KZN business owners, landlords, freelancers, and salaried employees with side income. SARS will issue auto-assessments, most people will accept them without a second glance, and some of them will walk away, happily, from money that was legally theirs.
How auto-assessments work
SARS doesn’t guess. The auto-assessment is built from data it already holds: your IRP5 certificate from your employer, your medical aid contributions and claims, your retirement fund contributions, and, increasingly, information from your bank and investment platforms. Under the SARS 3.0 modernisation drive, this data-matching capability has become considerably more sophisticated. The revenue authority is pulling in more third-party data than ever before and matching it against taxpayer declarations with AI-enabled accuracy.
That is genuinely impressive.
But here is the catch: SARS can only include what it has been given. It knows what your employer reported. It knows what your medical aid submitted. It does not know that you worked from a dedicated home office for eight months of the year. It does not know that you drove 14,000 kilometres for business purposes. It does not know about the rental property maintenance costs you paid last quarter, or the professional development course you funded yourself.
The auto-assessment is SARS doing its version of your homework. The problem is it can only mark what it can see.
The 40-day window
Once your auto-assessment is issued, you have 40 business days to review it. If you accept it or simply let the window close without acting that return is filed. For most non-provisional taxpayers, the final deadline is 23 October 2026. Provisional taxpayers and trusts have until 22 January 2027.
That window sounds generous. In practice, it disappears fast for anyone running a business, managing staff, or simply juggling the demands of life. And the consequences of getting it wrong are not abstract: accepting an incorrect assessment means either leaving a refund on the table, or if SARS’s pre-populated data happens to be incomplete in the other direction, understating income you should have declared.
The latter scenario carries real risk. Under SARS’s current enforcement posture, understatement penalties can reach 200% of the tax shortfall. Accepting an auto-assessment is not a shield against
audit.
What KZN taxpayers often miss
The deductions most overlooked in auto-assessments follow a recognisable pattern for KZN taxpayers specifically.
Property owners on the South Coast and in the Midlands who earn rental income frequently fail to offset eligible expenses – rates, levies, repairs, and bond interest – because those costs require active documentation and disclosure. SARS will not prompt you to include them.
Post-pandemic working arrangements have left many employees and sole proprietors with legitimate home office claims, but the qualifying criteria are specific and must be correctly applied. A dedicated space used exclusively and regularly for work purposes can generate a meaningful deduction; an unreported one generates nothing.
Business owners often blur the line between personal and business expenditure without realising it – not from dishonesty, but from the practical reality of running an SME where your car, your phone, and your laptop serve both purposes simultaneously. The proportional business-use deduction must be calculated and declared. SARS will not calculate it for you.
Retirement annuity contributions made independently of an employer scheme are frequently missed entirely. No third party submits that data to SARS on your behalf. If you contribute to a standalone RA and fail to include it in your return, you simply lose the deduction. That is money paid in twice: once in contributions, and once in tax you did not need to pay.
The click that costs you
None of this means auto-assessments are wrong in principle. For a salaried employee with a single income source, no investment income, and straightforward medical aid membership, the auto-assessment may be entirely accurate – and accepting it saves genuine time and administrative effort.
But for anyone with rental income, business interests, a side practice, significant travel costs, or assets that depreciate, an unreviewed auto-assessment is a risk. Not necessarily because SARS will penalise you – although that remains possible – but because the money you are owed simply will not arrive if you do not ask for it.
Tax season opens in July. You have until October to decide whether your return is correct. That is enough time to sit down with a professional, review what SARS has and has not included, and make sure you are not clicking accept on a number that belongs to someone else.
Your accountant isn’t just for filing. They’re your second opinion before you sign.
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