The 2022 Employer Annual Reconciliation filing season will soon be opening on 1 April 2022* and will close on 31 May 2022. This blog post details how this impacts you as an employer. For information on how this impacts you as an employee, please see this blog post.

*Please note: We have temporarily disabled some of the filing downloads in order to finalise updates and data checks that’ll ensure a smoother filing period for you. Please do not complete the submission using the draft PDFs. The full functionality will be available again from 8 April 2022.

How does this impact me as an employer?

You must ensure that you submit your Annual Reconciliation Declaration (EMP501) for the period 1 March 2021 – 28 February 2022 to SARS by 31 May 2022. These submissions are referred to as bi-annual filing, since you complete them twice a year - a submission in September for the first 6 months of the tax year, and this submission for the full tax year.

What documents do I need for the submission?

To complete the reconciliation process, you need your employee tax certificates (IRP5s and IT3(a)s) and your company’s EMP501. SimplePay automatically generates these for you - to access them, simply head to Filing > Bi-Annual Filing (IRP5s etc). Please note that you will need to pre-validate your data on SimplePay before you are able to download the file containing all employee tax certificates. This validation helps you to identify and correct any potential errors that you may receive when completing the submission with SARS. To minimise the validation errors that you may receive, please consult the checklist in this guide on our help site.

How do I complete the reconciliation?

Your submission can be done via eFiling (for less than 50 employees) or the e@syFile application (mandatory to use this option for 50 or more employees). You may need to update your e@syFile application to the latest version, 7.2.4. This can be done here. Please remember to back up your current information on your computer before installing a new version of e@syFile.

For more information on the bi-annual filing process, refer to this help page. We also have a useful guide to take you through it step by step.

Please always check the status of submissions to ensure their EMP501 has been successfully filed with SARS.

Can I opt out of doing bi-annual filing submissions?

No, it is a legal requirement for employers to submit their employee information to SARS. Failure to do so will result in a penalty of 1% of total annual PAYE being levied each month after May 2022 until the EMP501 is submitted (up to a maximum of 10%). In addition, please remember that any employer who wilfully or negligently fails to submit a return to SARS is guilty of an offence and is liable, upon conviction, to a fine or to imprisonment for a period of up to two years. This applies to EMP201s as well as EMP501s.

We hope this information helps clear up any uncertainties that you may have about the bi-annual filing process. As always, please feel free to contact us at support@simplepay.co.za if you have any questions.

Looking for a simple solution for bi-annual filing? Need to effortlessly calculate PAYE, SDL, UIF and ETI, and generate payslips for employees? Why not make use of our 30-day free trial and our free mobile app to see just how easy payroll can be? Sign up here.

Team SimplePay