In a 16 May 2016 South African Revenue Service (Sars) letter on the rules to the 2014 amended Customs Acts, titled “UPDATE ON NEW CUSTOMS LEGISLATION”, paragraph 3 reads “… The date for the workshop will be announced at a later stage but will likely be before the end of July 2016.”; and paragraph 4 “The second draft of the Customs Duty rules is near completion and is expected to be published for comment before the end of July 2016.”
When will the workshop take place, the second draft be published, and then what about the Customs Control rules?
You are reminded of the preceding 14 August 2015 Sars letter, paragraph 5: “Work has already begun on specific projects, such as registration and licensing … which will be implemented once the new Acts go live.”; and paragraph 6: “The first phase of implementation, which will deal with registration and licensing, is expected to go live in 2016. … .”
An article published by www.sanews.gov on 14 October 2015 - “New customs legislation to benefit SA” - states that “The new systems, policies and procedures are being developed in phases – the first three are registration and licensing, goods reporting and declaration processing. Roll-out of the registration and licensing phase will probably begin in the 2016/17 financial year. Each of these three initial phases will also have their own sub-phases. Sars also assured industry that it would not implement any aspect of the new legislation without proper consultation.”
Want to venture a guess on how many registered importers and exporters there are? (These figures do not account for bond and rebate registrants.) Well, according to Sars’ 2014/2015 Annual Report it’s 535 061 (280 953 importers and 254 108 exporters). Accepting that these numbers are significantly overstated, it would still take some doing to reprocess these. A separate question is of course in whose interests is it for these figures to continue to remain overstated?