Fixed administrative penalties will apply from February for non-compliance by trustees and tax practitioners who failed to file the annual tax returns for trusts by yesterday.

Missing the deadline this year will undoubtedly lead to penalties and interest, reports Moneyweb.

Phia van der Spuy, founder of Trusteeze, says very few trusts are compliant. She quoted statistics from 2024 when only around 84 000 trusts submitted their returns, notably up from 80 000 the prior year.

Recent estimates indicate that there are around 610 000 inter vivos trusts in SA, Van der Spuy said during a webinar on Friday unpacking the 2026 trust landscape.

The country still does not have a central database for trusts, even though this was one of the requirements for SA to be removed from the grey list.

Nonetheless, the country made it off the list at the end of last year.

It appears that not all trusts are registered with SARS as is required by law. This applies to resident and non-resident trusts, active and passive trusts and trusts with or without income or transactions.

A figure of only 400 000 SARS-registered trusts is being bandied about.

SARS is busy building a puzzle between the third-party data returns of trusts (IT3(t)s) and the returns submitted by the trust, its founders and beneficiaries.

‘It is becoming really interesting,’ says Van der Spuy.

Full Moneyweb report