SARS Is Not Out to Get You

Many taxpayers genuinely believe that SARS is out to get them — and to be fair, it’s not a completely irrational feeling. The tone of their letters can be intimidating, the deadlines unrealistic, and the system often feels one-sided. You file diligently, pay on time, and suddenly a verification notice or penalty lands in your inbox, phrased as if you’ve done something wrong. It’s no wonder people feel under siege.

But SARS isn’t sitting somewhere plotting against individual taxpayers. It’s a system — one that’s become increasingly automated, data-driven, and, unfortunately, detached from human understanding. Most reviews and audits are triggered by algorithms that pick up inconsistencies between your return and third-party data from banks, employers, medical aids, and investment houses. You weren’t chosen — your data simply didn’t align.

Over time, though, fear has crept into the entire experience of dealing with SARS. Somewhere along the line, compliance stopped being viewed as administrative and started feeling punitive. Many taxpayers now associate SARS with anxiety. They dread every notification or SMS, convinced it’s the beginning of a battle they can’t win. The media often amplifies that fear — every headline about “SARS cracking down” or “mass audits underway” reinforces the idea that ordinary taxpayers are being hunted.

The truth is that many of these processes are not nearly as daunting as they’re made to sound. Ceasing tax residency, for example, has been portrayed as a complex, adversarial process, when in fact it’s a structured declaration supported by documentation. It takes care and precision, yes — but it’s not an interrogation. The same applies to an Approval for International Transfer (AIT). It’s an administrative check to confirm your tax affairs are in order, not a moral judgment or loyalty test. Yet because of fear and misinformation, taxpayers often approach these steps expecting hostility when what’s really required is accuracy and patience.

Part of the problem lies in how SARS communicates. The correspondence is formal, impersonal, and heavy on legal phrasing. It assumes guilt before giving you a chance to explain. That tone, combined with the speed at which SARS can impose penalties or withhold refunds, creates the impression that taxpayers have no voice in the process. Even when the issue is small — a missed IRP5, a rounding difference, or a delayed certificate — the process can feel unnecessarily harsh.

As someone who deals with SARS daily, I see the same pattern over and over again: fear, frustration, and fatigue. People feel overwhelmed not because the law itself is impossible, but because the process feels cold and unbalanced. And while SARS’s systems are there to detect inconsistencies, they don’t distinguish between fraud, oversight, and simple human error. Everyone is treated the same. That’s what wears people down.

But it’s important to separate perception from reality. SARS isn’t out to get you — it’s enforcing the law as it’s required to, even if the way it does so often lacks empathy. For taxpayers, the best approach is to stay calm, informed, and engaged. Keep your records, respond within the time frames, and if you disagree, make use of the dispute and objection procedures provided under the Tax Administration Act. Those channels exist for a reason, and they do work — provided you engage correctly.

Compliance shouldn’t feel like a battle. It’s not about surrendering; it’s about understanding how the system works and asserting your rights within it. Once you strip away the noise, the fear, and the headlines, most SARS interactions come down to process, not persecution. And the more confidently and professionally you navigate that process, the less power it has to intimidate.

SARS is not out to get you. It may not make things easy, but it’s not hunting you down either. It’s a machine that needs to be managed — and the best way to do that is with calm, knowledge, and persistence. Because fear has no place in a system that’s meant to be based on fairness and law.