I pity those of you who bought three trusts from a firm of “specialists”, rather than just the one that you needed.

You now have three Beneficial Ownership returns to submit to the Master instead of one. You also have to be sure that you opened a bank account for each trust and deposited that initial donation of R100 into each account. And, by the way, since it is the initial donation that creates a trust, I am of the view that if you didn’t actually make that donation, then your trust does not exist, despite its being registered with the Master.

Then you must be sure that each trust is registered for tax. This used to be easy when the process was manual, but under the new online registation system I have recently been unable to register one of our shelf trusts. SARS technical support tried their best to assist but eventually had to give up. I was, however, able to make an appointment and do it manually with the help of a consultant.

And finally, when SARS sorts out their technical issues and the trust is registered for tax, you’ve got three tax returns to do each year instead of just one.

We are currently being engaged to deregister many of these superfluous trusts, because having a couple of them sitting in a cupboard gathering dust has suddenly become an expensive nuisance.