For over 20 years, we have been hearing that Government is working hard to make it easier to do business in South Africa. Huh?

It would be ridiculously simple if just one reasonably intelligent, well informed, person spent just one hour thinking about it. He or she would come up with the following for any company whose turnover is less than R20m.

• Eliminate annual CIPC returns. They are a complete waste of time and money and achieve nothing. Saving about R1 000.
• Eliminate provisional tax returns. Collect all taxes from the Annual tax returns. Saving about R1 000
  • this would reduce the number of tax returns each year from three to one and the tax collected would be the same.
  • it would also make it easier to obtain Tax Clearances which currently require that all provisional returns have been submitted.
• Stop hitting dormant companies with administrative penalties just because they haven’t submitted Nil tax returns.
  • if the company is dormant it has no mean of paying the penalties anyway. Saving R200 per month per return.
• Eliminate PAYE for directors. Make them annual tax payers, but without the need for provisional returns.
  • then one-man companies would not have to register as employers and file monthly PAYE returns and semi-annual reconciliations. Saving about R2 000 for registration and about R24 000 payroll services
• Eliminate UIF and COID for directors. Saving about R5 000 registration.
• Eliminate the B-BBEE affidavit (which is not actually an affidavit) for all EME’s and QSE’s. Saving about R900
• Eliminate annual returns to the Department of Social Development (for Non Profit Organisations).
• Eliminate the requirement that a business must be a going concern in order for its sale to be zero rated for VAT.
• Do NOT proceed with proposed new legislation requiring registration of shareholders at CIPC. Saving about R1 000

Total saving about R35 000 excluding the administrative penalties.

This would put Harbour and Associates and a lot of other service providers out of business (unless I could think of something else we could do). But that just proves my point.