Before you invest offshore, ensure that your tax records are in order or the taxman could come knocking at your door, warns Belinda Beresford
You’re considering emigrating, you want to diversify your investment portfolio, or perhaps you just want to bet on the continual fall of the rand. But the time has come to invest in a foreign currency.
Whether you want to send your money to multiply in foreign climes, perhaps in a nice little tax haven, or you simply want to keep it in a local bank in a foreign currency account, there is one obstacle to overcome: the taxman.
Taking up your foreign currency investment allowance means signing a declaration that your tax affairs are in good standing, and that form inevitably finds its way to the South African Revenue Service. In signing the exchange control forms to buy foreign exchange, you give permission to the Reserve Bank to pass information on to the revenue service .
Once in the revenue service net, the taxman casts a beady eye over the form, paying particular care to any discrepancies with any other information he may have on you. Or even information that he may not have on you, if you’ve failed to file tax returns recently or failed to register at all.
The revenue service says the issue is too sensitive for it to reveal how many people have completed such a declaration — or the numbers who have been caught lying. But representative Christo Henning said the proportion of people who have been detected lying is “hair-raising”.
“I think people don’t take it seriously. We’ve had cases where individuals did lie and we … follow up to prosecute to the full extent of the law.”
Henning said it was difficult for the revenue service to get a feel for the number of people who could potentially utilise the investment allowance since a surprising number of non-economically active people had indicated interest in investing overseas. In these cases the revenue service queried the source of the funds.
Many people, he said, offered sound reasons for having the money; for example, through inheritance, the sale of an asset or having received it as a gift. However, the revenue service would check the relevant taxes, such as transfer fees on the sale of an asset, had been paid. It would also check that the money being transferred was not part of a scheme to avoid taxes.
Henning concedes the tax form could have been a deterrent for South Africans thinking of using their R200 000 allowance. Some people would “rather not make the declaration because they would have too much to lose if caught”.
South African’s should pay tax on “passive income”, such as on interest earned overseas. But the revenue service has a problem getting this information since foreign banks are not bound by South African legislation.
Offshore banks are not obliged to provide a certificate of interest payments to the revenue service, and the onus is on the person to declare income, although, at the investor’s request, banks will produce the relevant documents.
If a bank simply acts as a transmission agent, or in other words merely sends the money overseas, it does not have to declare the details to the revenue service because no interest payments were made.
Overseas banks are not bound to disclose information to South African regulatory authorities, and the definition of overseas banks can include the foreign operations of local banks.
For example, Standard Bank’s offshore operations are based in the Isle of Man and Jersey. So interest earned by an investment in Standard Bank’s overseas subsidiary comes under British regulatory authorities.
However, it is likely to become increasingly difficult to avoid searching questions from the revenue service, particularly if you are wealthy.
New computer systems, coming online at the end of the year, combined with greater organisational autonomy, should mean a decline in the revenue service’s notorious inefficiency.
As different information systems start to talk electronically, it will become easier for those irritating little questions to arise, like how did you manage to save R200 000 to invest overseas on such a low declared income?