Individual taxpayers paid, on average, 20.2 percent of their taxable income as tax in the 2011/12 tax year, the latest statistics released by the South African Revenue Service (SARS) and the National Treasury show.
According to SARS and Treasury’s 2013 Tax Statistics booklet, individual taxpayers earned taxable income of R1 trillion in the 2011/12 tax year and paid R206.7 billion in tax.
Tax Statistics shows that R813.8 billion in tax revenue was collected in the 2012/13 tax year. Of this, personal income tax amounted to 34 percent and company tax to 19.8 percent.
Value-added tax (VAT) accounted for the other major portion of the tax collected (26.4 percent), and 19.8 percent came from other taxes, such as environmental taxes.
The key statistics for personal income tax show that, in 2011/12, almost 70 percent of personal income taxpayers received refunds from SARS when assessed, 13.8 percent of taxpayers neither owed SARS, nor received a refund, and 16.2 percent of taxpayers had to pay in.
Tax refunds can arise as result of deductions that are not taken into account when the tax your employer withholds each month as pay-as-you-earn is calculated.
Tax Statistics shows that the contributions we, as taxpayers, made to retirement funds reduced our collective taxable income by R41.7 billion, while medical expenses reduced our taxable income by R60.6 billion.
The booklet does not provide the amount of tax that taxpayers saved as a result of these deductions.
It records that there were 13.7 million registered individual taxpayers in 2011/12, and 5.1 million were assessed.
Treasury estimates that some eight million registered taxpayers will, in the 2013/14 tax year, earn below R60 000 for the year and thus too little to pay tax.
The tax threshold for taxpayers below the age of 65 in the 2013/2014 tax year is R67 111 a year; in the 2011/12 tax year it was R59 750. The threshold is higher for taxpayers aged 65 to 75 and aged 75 and above.
Also in the 2011/12 tax year, taxpayers earning below R120 000 and with simple tax affairs were not required to complete tax returns. The earning limit was raised to R250 000 for the 2013/14 tax year.
Don’t forget that the deadline for filing your tax return for the 2012/13 tax year for anyone other than provisional taxpayers is less than four weeks away, on Friday, November 22.
You can now only file your return electronically via efiling or at a SARS branch as the deadline for filing paper returns has passed.
Provisional taxpayers who file electronically, only need to submit their income returns by Friday, January 31, next year.