Stay safe this tax filing season

Auto-assessments have started - and so have scams. Here's what to watch out for.

- By Neesa Moodley

It's tax time you should have started getting tax certificate notices from your medical scheme provider, your retirement annuity provider and any financial institutions with which you have savings or investments.

The good news is that there's still time. At the moment, the South African Revenue Service (SARS) is rolling out auto-assessments. If you are one of those selected for an auto-assessment, you will receive a notification via SMS or email by Sunday, 20 July.

If you don't want to wait, you can check if you are going to be auto-assessed by using the SARS Online Query System dashboard on the Use our Digital Channels webpage.

Once you have accessed it, navigate to the “My Auto Assessment Status” icon to check your status.

How do auto-assessments work?

An auto-assessment is an automatic tax assessment of a personal income tax return for which SARS uses prefiled information to issue an assessment without the need for taxpayers to submit a tax return. Information that SARS uses to prepopulate the form comes from your employer/s, banks, medical schemes, retirement funds and insurers.