We might be in the middle of the 2016/17 tax season, but on Monday, SARS released a whole lot of stats regarding last year’s one.

One of the more interesting ones was that the South African Revenue Service paid out “an astounding R15.5 billion in tax refunds” to just under two million taxpayers by the end of tax season.

And the real interesting part about it is the turn around time: Processing 99.9% of the returns electronically,

• 92.4% of tax returns were assessed within three seconds; and
• 93.28% of refunds were paid to taxpayers within 72 hours.

That’s pretty sweet – especially if you have professionals like Gralbraith | Rushby doing your work for you – and BAM, there’s a stash of cash in your bank account with little to no work having been done.

(After all, not all of us can profess to be ‘numbers people’.)

SARS also explained that it has “imposed penalties to the value of R1.64 billion on defaulting taxpayers” by the season deadline for non-provisional taxpayers last Friday. Spokesperson Sandile Memela said:

Taxpayers that have not submitted their returns are urged to do so immediately.

Come on, guys, it’s not like you need to do it yourself.

Timeslive jotted down some other sweet statistics from SARS:

• SARS received 5.74-million returns by the close of tax season;
• 4.16 -million submissions by individuals for the 2015/16 tax year;
• 47 000 submissions by trusts for 2015/16 tax year;
• 1.52 million returns for previous tax years from individuals and trusts;
• The SARS Contact Centre handled more than 3.6-million calls;
• The SARS branch offices assisted more than 5.1-million taxpayers;
• 173 000 taxpayers made use of the Help You e-File channel which is 15% higher than in 2015; and
• 44 373 made use SARS’ mobile application to submit their 2016 tax returns.

In all honesty, if you haven’t being paid tax, you’re going to get nailed heavily when the truth comes out. My advice would be to get these guys on the line and get ‘adulting’ – whatever that means.

[source:timeslive]