11 May 2023 – SARS is committed to paying legitimate refunds to qualifying taxpayers as and when they become due. In line with this commitment in the 2022/23 financial year a record R381bn in refunds were paid of which R319bn were VAT refunds.
SARS has noticed a trend of suspicious registrations by VAT vendors. In the month of April, specifically, we saw a significant spike that required us to conduct an urgent review of our registration process. A key strategic objective and design principle of our administration platform is to provide ease of registration. This must be balanced with the risk of abuse and attempts by individuals to obtain a VAT number and claim fraudulent refunds. We were alerted by our sophisticated risk engine that there was an unusual increase in the number of registrations, all of which were suspicious.
