SARS is look­ing to double its staff com­ple­ment to be deployed in an area for enfor­cing dis­clos­ures of crypto asset trans­ac­tions.

According to Business Day, this will be part of its wider push to rake in bil­lions of rand said to be owed to the fiscus across the eco­nomy by errant tax­pay­ers.

SARS said it was scru­tin­ising off­shore invest­ments in this area and is work­ing with SARB on it, while also min­ing crypto data to identify high-risk mater­ial trans­ac­tions and non-­com­pli­ance.

SARS has also pri­or­it­ised the encour­age­ment of crypto traders to take advant­age of the agency’s vol­un­tary dis­clos­ure pro­gramme.

‘We have raised audit assess­ments (almost R2bn) and noti­fied those tax­pay­ers who incor­rectly cal­cu­lated gains or used a cap­ital gains tax cal­cu­la­tion when they have in fact been trad­ing,’ the agency said.

SARS said it was recon­cil­ing return data to dis­cern improve­ment in com­pli­ance.

‘Pre­vi­ously only 17 000 tax­pay­ers dis­closed crypto on their returns, yet we are aware that there are 5.8m crypto hold­ers in SA.’ 

Tax attor­neys have seen the agency take a harder line as it chases more than R500bn in unpaid taxes.

Geo Kilian, tax attor­ney at Hobbs Sin­clair Advis­ory, said SARS was increas­ingly out­sourcing tough cases and using AI to spot non­com­pli­ance.

‘SARS is mov­ing away from leni­ency towards a far more assert­ive pos­ture. If you’re delib­er­ately avoid­ing your oblig­a­tions, expect to face judg­ments, asset seizures and per­sonal liab­il­ity,’ Kilian said.

SARS used AI and data ana­lyt­ics to recover R89.3bn from 26m tax­pay­ers in the 2022/23 fin­an­cial year.

Full Business Day report