An amendment to the Income Tax Act, effective from 1 March 2018, has made it a lot easier for taxpayers to account for interest owed to them by SARS.
Until last year, you had to “accrue” such interest – in other words, show it as income regardless of whether or not you had actually received it. The difficulty here has been that SARS can take a few years to actually pay the refund, exacerbated by the fact that SARS frequently adjusts the interest due to you, which can relate to a prior year.
The new procedure is that you only need to show the interest in the year it is received – a bonus both for ease of completing your tax return, and for your cash flow.
|