Oh dear! What is SARS thinking?

In the good old days, we had to appoint a Public Officer for each company. That was the person who was to be responsible for submitting the tax returns and responding to SARS’ correspondence.

Then suddenly, in about March 2021, we found that we were unable to submit certain returns or get a Tax Clearance for our newer companies, because there was no “Representative” appointed.

So what happened to the Public Officer? If you check out SARS’ document “Enhancements for Tax Practitioners and representatives” you will see that they refer to “the Public Officer/representative”. But clearly they are not one and the same, else why would we have to register a representative?

But there’s a clue here:

It seems that if you are the Public Officer, you can also be the representative.

Note from the above list, that the main member or accounting officer of a CC can be the Registered Representative, but what about a director or Shareholder of a company?

Confused? Me too! No wonder it took my staff a few months to figure out how to appoint a representative.