SA Revenue Service (Sars) has denied rumours that the August 1 compliance deadline for its enhanced manifest regulation, Reporting of Conveyances and Goods (RCG), has been postponed.
The results of a trade readiness survey could however swing this decision. Sars agreed to conduct the survey following a technical session on June 20 where stakeholders expressed concern that they would not be able to meet the deadline for a variety of reasons, said Sars executive Beyers Theron.
These reasons included local and global payments that were outstanding, the wide ambit of time required, and the time needed to ensure that all supply chain entities were ready to report, Theron added. A questionnaire was sent out on June 25 and gave freight forwarders and other concerned parties until June 29 to reply. “Sars will analyse the responses received in order to determine whether any change needs to be made to the previously communicated deadline,” Theron said.
Replying to a query sent out by FTW, Jacques du Plessis, senior entry clerk for Tigers Global Logistics, said they did not know whether there was any truth to the rumour that the deadline had been undermined by a lack of readiness. He said that South African Association of Freight Forwarders director, Johan Marais, had confirmed that there was no awareness of “any postponement dates with regards to the RCG rollout”.
Should the deadline indeed be delayed, it could affect “our timeliness in terms of when we start placing our full attention on the air modality with regards to RCG’s roll-out”, Theron said. When RCG initially went live on April 20 Sars decided to focus on Durban harbour as a pilot for the sea modality – turning its attention to airfreight once that was embedded.
More importantly, the revenue service “engaged extensively with industry on both a technical and business level in order to ensure that service providers, as well as individual cargo reporters, would be ready to submit reports in time”. Speaking to FTW from Brussels, Theron said speculation that RCG’s August 1 implementation was in danger, came from an “unreliable source”.
However, the source in question, a regular advertiser in FTW, said “my gut-feeling is that RCG could be pushed out to a later date.” Should this happen it will have to come from the steering committee (steercom) of the New Customs Act Programme (Ncap). “We have not made any such decision which in any event is a decision that would have to be made by the Ncap steercom,” Theron said.
Nevertheless, it all adds to an air of heightened anticipation when and if the survey’s findings are revealed.
