During the 2022 tax year, many tax returns were rejected by SARS.  Most of these tax returns related to issues with auto assessments where taxpayers had missed their 40 day deadline to file,  however a number of rejections were also because taxpayers filed their tax returns on eFiling before tax season had officially opened.

There are only three specific instances where you can file your tax return (ITR12) directly on eFiling before tax season starts:

• If you have been declared insolvent / sequestrated;
• If you need to file a return for a deceased estate;
• If you are emigrating and need to submit your tax compliance status to your bank.

If you are not insolvent, emigrating or filing a return for a deceased estate, we suggest that you DO NOT file your tax return before tax season officially opens (usually 1 July each year), as SARS will do the following:

• Your tax return will be routed to their manual assessment centre and you will need to wait for 6 months to receive an outcome
• Because your IRP5 has not been submitted by your employer yet (your employer needs to send SARS your IRP5 by the end of May each year) SARS will include any income you declare on your tax return and remove the related employee's tax, since there’s no supporting reconciliation from your employer to confirm the payment of employees tax (PAYE).
• SARS will finalise your tax year, and you will need to lodge a dispute against the assessment they initially issued for you - this process could take anything from 3 months to 12 months, depending on when you lodge the dispute.

This is the box you should see on eFiling if you try to request your tax return before tax season opens:

If you requested the tax return by accident, you can click on "Cancel" and this will remove the tax return from your eFiling profile. 

Important: You can submit your 2023 tax return on TaxTim prior to 1 July. We will store it in our filing queue, so it's ready for submission to SARS when the tax season opens.