SARS moved fast this year. Auto-assessments went out between 1 and 12 July, about six million of them, and by the end of the first day more than 1.9 million taxpayers had been assessed. Roughly R8 billion in refunds was paid out inside 72 hours.
That speed is a genuine improvement over how this used to work. It has also created two specific ways for people to lose money this season, and both of them are happening right now, in volume.
The first is borrowing against a refund before it lands. The second is having the refund stolen outright by someone who got into your eFiling profile. They are unrelated problems with the same root cause: an assessment notice showing a number is not the same thing as money in your account, and the gap between those two states is where the damage happens.
Filing is open until 23 October for most taxpayers, and to 22 January 2027 if you are provisional. So this is live for another few months.
What an assessment actually tells you
An auto-assessment or an assessment after filing says: based on the information SARS holds, this is what your position looks like. It is a calculation, not a payment instruction that cannot be changed.
Between that notice and cash in your bank account, several things can still happen. The refund can be selected for verification, which adds weeks. It can be adjusted if SARS receives corrected third-party data from your employer, medical scheme, or retirement fund. It can be reduced. And it can be offset — if you owe SARS anything at all, that liability comes off the refund before you see a cent.
The offset is the one that catches people hardest, because the debt is often old and half-forgotten. Outstanding returns from three years ago that were never filed. Administrative penalties that accumulated at R250 a month on a return nobody submitted. Interest on a prior assessment. An IT88 for an unpaid amount. People with an assessment showing R14,000 have received R2,000, and the difference was not an error — it was a tax debt they had stopped thinking about.
Which is why the single most useful thing you can do before making any decision involving that money is to pull your Statement of Account on eFiling. It shows what you owe across all tax years. Two minutes, and it tells you whether the refund figure on your assessment is the figure you will actually receive.
The borrowing problem
Debt counsellors have been unusually vocal about this in July, and the pattern they are describing is worth taking seriously because it is not the pattern you would expect.
This is not primarily a low-income phenomenon. The people taking short-term credit against expected refunds skew middle and upper income — earners with enough tax withheld to generate a meaningful refund in the first place, and enough existing commitments that a few weeks of bridging feels manageable. Someone expecting R18,000 in September takes R8,000 now on a 30-day product, fully intending to settle it the moment the refund clears.
Then the refund is verified and takes six weeks instead of two. Or it comes in at R6,000 because of penalties on an unfiled 2023 return. The short-term loan rolls. At the NCA cap for short-term credit — 5% a month on a first loan — a rolled R8,000 is costing R400 a month in interest alone before fees, and the borrower is now servicing it out of salary rather than out of the refund they planned around.
Sowetan reported in early July on the sharper end of this: people borrowing from informal lenders against expected refunds. That is the version with real consequences, because a mashonisa charging 30% to 50% a month against a refund that arrives late or light is how a R5,000 bridge becomes a R12,000 problem by October.
The principle is simple and it is the whole point of this section. A refund is not income until it is in your account. Not when the assessment arrives, not when the status changes to “refund due”, not when a tax practitioner tells you what they calculated. When it is in the account.
If you have already borrowed against a refund
Pull the Statement of Account first, so you know the real number rather than the assessment number. Then check the actual refund status on eFiling rather than relying on the assessment notice — the status will tell you if it has gone to verification.
If it has, and your loan is a 30-day product, contact the lender before the due date rather than after it. Registered lenders will usually restructure a short-term loan into instalments if you approach them ahead of a missed payment. The same conversation after a returned debit order is a different and much worse conversation, and the returned debit order itself will sit on your bank statement affecting your next twelve months of credit applications.
The scam wave, which is worse this year
SARS issued warnings on this twice in the last two weeks of July, and the reason is that the quality of the fraud has jumped noticeably.
The old tax-season phishing email was easy to spot — broken English, obviously wrong logos, a link to something that looked nothing like eFiling. That is no longer what is arriving. Criminals are using AI to generate emails that reproduce SARS templates convincingly, with correct branding, plausible reference numbers, and clean language.
The mechanics to know:
Spoofed sender addresses. Messages arriving from things like [email protected] or [email protected]. Note the domain — SARS uses sars.gov.za. The .co.za version is not SARS. This single detail identifies a large share of the current wave.
An implausibly good number. The messages typically claim a refund far larger than the recipient would expect, often up to around R50,000. The size of the number is the hook — it is designed to make you click before you think about whether it is plausible.
The real objective is your eFiling profile, not a once-off payment. This is the part people misunderstand. The fake site harvests your login credentials. With those, fraudsters get into your actual eFiling profile and change your registered banking details. Your genuine refund, the real one you were legitimately owed, is then paid by SARS into their account. Most victims only discover this when the money never arrives and they start querying it — by which point it is gone.
That is why credential theft in tax season is materially worse than an ordinary phishing loss. They are not stealing a payment you make. They are redirecting a payment SARS makes.
The rules that keep you out of this
SARS does not ask for passwords, OTPs, banking PINs, or eFiling login details. Not by email, not by SMS, not by phone, not on social media. There is no exception to this and no scenario in which a legitimate SARS process requires you to supply any of them to someone who contacted you.
So: never reach eFiling through a link in a message. Type the address yourself or use your bookmark, every time, even when the message looks correct. This one habit defeats essentially the entire current campaign, because the fraud depends on you arriving at their site instead of the real one.
Check the sender domain is sars.gov.za. Check your registered banking details on eFiling now, while nothing is wrong, so you know what they are supposed to say. And if you use a tax practitioner, verify they are registered with a recognised controlling body before handing over your credentials — and understand that a legitimate practitioner does not need your eFiling password to act for you, because practitioners are linked to your profile through SARS’s own system.
Suspicious messages go to [email protected]. If you think your profile has been compromised, the Fraud and Anti-Corruption Hotline is 0800 00 2870, and you should call it the same day rather than waiting to see whether the refund arrives.
What to do with the refund when it does arrive
Since this is a site about credit, the honest version rather than the motivational-poster version.
If you have short-term debt — anything at 5% a month, anything informal, any store account that has been revolving for months — that is where the refund goes. Not because paying debt is virtuous, but because nothing else available to you returns 60% a year guaranteed. Clearing a payday loan is the highest-return use of a lump sum most people will ever have access to.
If you have arrears about to become a default listing, curing them buys you five years of cheaper credit access, which is worth more than the amount involved suggests.
If neither applies, a buffer of one month’s expenses in a separate account is what stops the next unexpected R4,000 from becoming a loan at all. That is unglamorous and it is the thing that actually breaks the cycle for people who keep ending up on comparison sites looking for emergency credit.
What the refund should not fund is the repayment of a loan you took out in order to spend the refund early. That is the loop this whole article is about, and roughly R8 billion moved through the system in the first three days of July, which tells you how many people are somewhere inside it right now.
— Romans
General information, not tax or financial advice. For your specific assessment, a registered tax practitioner or SARS directly are the right places to go — and SARS’s own channels cost nothing.