The South African Revenue Service (Sars) on 03 May announced that the third draft of the Customs Control Rules (rules) to the Customs Control Act 31 of 2014 (Act) had been published for sight, and not for public comment. According to the notification, as previously explained to stakeholders, this draft has been “frozen” for purposes of Sars’ systems development.
The amendments made to the second draft of the rules to the Act include changes occasioned by external stakeholder comments received, internal feedback and Sars operational requirements, changes to give effect to amendments and proposed amendments to the Act, (as contained in the Tax Administration Laws Amendment Act, 2016, and to be contained in the Tax Administration Laws Amendment Bill, 2017), as well as the technical review of the draft as a whole. Technical amendments include the correction of errors, the moving of provisions, the adaptation of wording to ensure consistency of similar provisions throughout the text, the insertion of provisions inadvertently omitted, the insertion of general provisions applicable to all the chapters and the consequential deletion or adaptation of provisions in the various chapters.
This publication consists of two documents, (i) The first document is the official “clean”, renumbered third draft of the Control Rules, or the so-called “frozen” Control Rules. This draft contains all amendments but does not indicate the changes effected to the second draft of the rules; and (ii) The other document indicates changes effected by strikethrough text highlighted in blue (for deletions) and underlined text highlighted in yellow (for insertions).
In the case of any unintentional discrepancy between the wording of the document indicating changes and the official “clean” third draft, the wording of the “clean” draft prevails.
As for Chapters 2 and 37, the draft rules will be published for public comment at a later stage when these chapters have been finalised.