SARS (South African Revenue Service) has issued an alert to the South African taxpayers that new phishing e-mails are presently circulating online. These e-mails appear genuine since they carry the authorized logo of SARS.

These scam e-mails state that there’s a tax re-imbursement that the recipient can now claim.

Specifically, according to any of these e-mails, after SARS made the latest yearly computations of the fiscal operations the e-mail recipient incurred, it has been found that he/she is entitled to get 8,582.50 ZAR as tax refund.

The message continues to inform that the recipient must file a request for the tax refund fast and give a 2-3-day time-period for SARS to complete the claim’s processing.

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CAPE TOWN — The South African Revenue Service (SARS) conducted 1740 in-depth investigations of individual taxpayers in the 2008-09 tax year out of a total of 72926 audits across all tax types and on all categories of taxpayers, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said in a written reply to a parliamentary question about lifestyle audits.

Lifestyle audits have become a hot potato after calls were made by Congress of South African Trade Unions general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi that politicians with flashy lifestyles be subjected to them.

This was followed by calls by opposition politicians that African National Congress Youth League president Julius Malema undergo a lifestyle audit to determine how he earned all the money that allowed him to buy luxury cars, mansions and clothing. Replying to a question by Congress of the People MP Nic Koornhof, Gordhan said SARS used a risk-based approach to identify and investigate noncompliance with tax and customs laws.

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