Trust filing season: Trustee organizing documents with colorful markers for 2025 tax filing.

2025 Trust Filing Season: The IT3(t) Question That Could Cost Trustees – and Catch Beneficiaries

The 2025 trust filing season (20 September 2025 to 19 January 2026) opened against a new backdrop: the updated trust income tax return (ITR12T) now includes compliance questions that change how trusts disclose income and beneficiaries to the South African Revenue Service (SARS).

Bitcoin coins on a laptop keyboard with a crypto market chart, symbolizing the need for the Voluntary Disclosure Programme for crypto traders.

Voluntary Disclosure Programme: A Last Chance for Crypto Traders Before the 2026 Crackdown?

SARS are leveraging their powers under the Tax Administration Act, which provides for instances in which the Directors, Public Officers, or other representative taxpayers, can be held personally liable for a company’s tax debt!

SARS targeting prominent persons for company tax debts review in financial documents.

SARS Targets Prominent Persons for their Company’s Tax Debts

SARS are leveraging their powers under the Tax Administration Act, which provides for instances in which the Directors, Public Officers, or other representative taxpayers, can be held personally liable for a company’s tax debt!

Gavel and legal books symbolizing SARS tax residency and legal processes

Beyond Textbooks: The Tax Lessons You Only Learn on the Job

What you think you know about tax when coming out of university changes quickly once you step into a top tax practice. Within the first few weeks on the job, I realised academic knowledge could only take me so far; the real depth begins in practice, far beyond what the lecture hall prepares you for. […]

A wooden gavel next to a brass scale, symbolizing justice and legal matters, with a focus on the Tax Amendment Bill's legal implications and penalties.

National Treasury’s Tax Amendment Bills Puts “Bona Fide Inadvertent Error” on the Chopping Block

For years, taxpayers and their advisors have relied on a small phrase in the Tax Administration Act (TAA) as a defence against understatement penalties, which can run up to 200 percent of the shortfall between what taxpayers declared and the revised assessment. But that lifeline is now on the chopping block.