2023 Filing Season Now Open

Welcome to the 2023 Employer Annual Reconciliation Filing Season! The filing season officially opened on 1 April and will close on 31 May. As an employer, it is important that you stay up to date with the latest tax and other statutory filing requirements to ensure that you remain compliant with regulations. In this blog, we’ll take a look at what you need to know about the 2023 Employer Annual Reconciliation Filing Season in South Africa.

What is the Employer Annual Reconciliation? 

The Employer Annual Reconciliation is a statutorily mandated process where employers submit their employees’ tax certificates and other relevant information to the South African Revenue Service (SARS). The information is used to calculate the employer’s liability for PAYE, SDL, and UIF for the tax year ended 28 February. 

What are the Changes for 2023?

There are no significant changes to the Employer Annual Reconciliation process for 2023. However, there are a few points to keep in mind:

• The due date for submission of the EMP501 and employees’ tax certificates is 31 May 2023.
• Employers are required to reconcile and submit all of their employees’ tax certificates, irrespective of the amount the employees earned during the tax year.
• Employers are required to ensure that their employees’ tax certificates reflect the correct information, including the employees’ personal details, income, tax deductions, and benefits.

How to Do Submissions? 

Submissions can be made via eFiling should your employee count be less than 50, or the e@syFile application, which is mandatory if your employee count is 50 or more. Please ensure that you are using the most recent version of e@syFile, which can be found here. Existing information should be backed up before installing the newest version of e@syFile. 

Documentation needed for the submission is conveniently generated by SimplePay, based on your payroll information. You can also pre-validate your information on SimplePay, to identify and correct any errors you might receive while completing your submission. You will also need to pre-validate before the export file containing the tax certificates can be generated. Our Guide to Bi-Annual Employer Reconciliation help page can guide you through the filing process. It is important to ensure that you check the status of your submissions to ensure that your EMP501 has been successfully filed with SARS.

Can I Choose Not to Submit?

The short answer is no. It is a legal requirement for employers to submit their employee information to SARS. Failure to submit can result in a penalty of 1% of the total annual PAYE being levied each month - from June 2023 until the EMP501 is filed (up to a maximum of 10%). Please bear in mind that an employer found to have wilfully or negligently failed to submit a SARS return is guilty of an offence. Upon conviction, this could result in an additional fine, or even imprisonment of up to two years. This applies to EMP201s as well as EMP501s.

We hope that, armed with this info and all your SimplePay filing documents, you will have a smooth and stress-free filing season! Please feel free to contact our awesome Support Team at support@simplepay.co.za if you need any help.

If you aren’t yet a SimplePay user, we recommend trying a free, 30-day trial to see how simple submissions can be!

Take care,

Team SimplePay