Unresolved Tax return due to highly *********** staff looking at the wrong things!

Since the 15th of July I have not been able to submit my Tax returns through SARS eFiling as a result of an error on the Sanlam IRP5. This was for provident fund that I had withdrawn around the month of May 2024.

Following the advise of my accountant, I brought the error to the attention of the Sanlam team, on the 18th of July, citing that they had incorrectly issued a Tax directive with the 'transaction date' as 2025 & the 'assessment date' as 2024, hence the error. They came back with some guidelines to load the IRP5 manually, which my accountant tried & it still did not work as the error still persisted.

Following further follow up & escalation, I was contacted by Marsha in the complaints department who admitted that she was not an expert & did not understand where the error was. She escalated further & I was advised to get a case reference from SARS. My accountant had already had interactions with SARS to confirm that the error was on Sanlam's side.

I further went to into my last provident fund withdrawal, which took place around May 2023, & which had also been managed by Sanlam & where they had issued an IRP5 with the 'transaction date' & 'assessment date' as 2024. So, same transaction, similar period - you would expect that the issued IRP5 would follow the same principle, right? I sent all the info (screenshots of both IRP6's, attachments of all docs & screenshot of error with SARS) to the Sanlam team, by this time it had been further escalated to Bevan Prince ("PAYE Manager"). Feedback that was given was that the error was reading from the previous IRP5 that I had received from Sage (a Payroll & Accounting software & systems specialist) citing that there was a source code that was included that was not relevant to me, when it actually was!!

I see that that none of these people actually want to resolve my query & keep passing the buck & shoving me off with incorrect information I have so much back & forth with the Sanlam team & I am utterly flabbergasted at their sheer lack of competency never mind the professionalism because that could also do with some work.

To date, I still cannot file for my tax returns because of the same error & yet they deem the case closed on their end.