Expat tax : will it contribute to tax evasion by South African expats working abroad?

Abstract

South African expats who work abroad used to enjoy a full exemption of tax on their foreign remuneration income, but the National Treasury and SARS had „expat tax‟ up their sleeves. Pravin Gordhan, the previous Minister of Finance, made their intention to review the exemption known during the 2017 Annual Budget Speech held on 22 February 2017 (National Treasury, 2017a; Pretorius, 2017). This amendment was however only promulgated on the 22nd of October 2020 and held that only R1.25 million of employment income earned abroad by a South African resident will be exempt from tax per annum, subject to certain requirements, as from the 1st of March 2020 (SARS, 2020a). This amendment limited the previous 100% exemption contained in section 10(1)(o)(ii) of the Income Tax Act No. 58 of 1962 and resulted in „expat tax‟. Expats would undoubtedly weigh their options in counteracting the imposed expat tax, which might further increase the already worrisome tax gap in South Africa (Business Tech, 2019a; Smith, 2019). The study answered its research question of whether expat tax will contribute to tax evasion by South Africans working abroad by reaching set research objectives, as mentioned in Section 1.5, by way of a systematised review. The study found that the two most influential tax evasion factors present in South Africa, namely the perceptions of government and high tax rates as identified in a previous study conducted by the researcher (Ferreira, 2017), were also present in the reactions or expected reactions, of expats to expat tax. Expat tax may be new to South Africa but tax evasion certainly is not. Should the expected evasion of the newly implemented expat tax in South Africa materialise, the tax gap would be placed under further strain.