Free Tax Debt Assessment

What happens after you submit

1. A consultant reads your answers and builds a picture of where you stand with SARS — normally within one working day.
2. We call you for about twenty minutes to confirm the numbers, establish what SARS has already done (a final demand, a third-party appointment on your bank account, a civil judgment), and work out what deadlines you are up against.
3. You get a written recommendation: which relief route fits your situation, what it will cost, what SARS will want to see, and how long it usually takes.

The relief routes we assess you against

There is no single “tax debt solution”. The Tax Administration Act gives SARS several mechanisms, and the one that fits depends on whether you can pay, when you can pay, and whether the assessment itself is correct.

• Compromise of tax debt (section 200). SARS permanently writes off part of what you owe where recovering the full amount is not realistic and the compromise secures more for the fiscus than liquidation or sequestration would.
• Instalment payment arrangement (section 167). The debt stays in full but is paid off over an agreed period. Interest continues to run, so this suits a cash-flow problem rather than an affordability problem.
• Suspension of payment (section 164(2)). Collection is paused while a genuine dispute over the assessment is decided. Without it, the “pay now, argue later” rule means SARS can collect even while you are objecting.
• Remission of penalties and interest. Where the default had a reasonable cause, or was a first incidence, the penalty and interest component can often be reduced or removed entirely.
• Voluntary Disclosure Programme. If there is undeclared income behind the debt, disclosing it before SARS finds it removes the understatement penalty and the risk of prosecution.

The assessment is free and commits you to nothing, and we do not need your eFiling login to do it. If the right answer is that you should simply pay the account, we will tell you that.