SARS Tax Compliance Status: How to Get and Keep a Compliant PIN

Almost every meaningful commercial opportunity in South Africa eventually asks for proof that you are square with SARS. Tenders, government contracts, most large corporate supplier onboarding processes, foreign investment allowances and many bank facilities all check your SARS tax compliance status. If it comes back non-compliant, the conversation usually stops there.

What catches businesses out is that this is no longer a certificate you obtain once and file away. It is a live status, and it can change without anyone telling you.

What replaced the tax clearance certificate

SARS moved from a printed Tax Clearance Certificate to the Tax Compliance Status (TCS) system. You request a status through eFiling and receive a TCS PIN. You give the PIN to the party who needs it, and they use it to check your status directly with SARS, as often as they like, for as long as the PIN is valid.

Statuses are requested for a purpose: Good Standing for general use, Tender, Foreign Investment Allowance, or Emigration. Choose the right one, because tender applications are frequently rejected for the wrong request type rather than for actual non-compliance.

The four things that turn your status red

How to request a TCS PIN on eFiling

1. 1Log in to eFiling as the taxpayer or as the registered representative.
2. 2Activate the Tax Compliance Status service if it is not already active on the profile. This is a once-off step and is where most first-time users stall.
3. 3Open Tax Compliance Status, then Tax Compliance Status Request, and choose the purpose: Good Standing, Tender, FIA or Emigration.
4. 4Complete the request. eFiling shows your current status immediately, with a breakdown of the items causing any non-compliance.
5. 5Once compliant, issue the PIN and record its expiry date in your compliance calendar.
6. 6Share the PIN with the third party, together with your tax reference number.

The dormant registration trap

The most common cause we see of an unexpectedly red status has nothing to do with money owed. It is a registration nobody closed. A company registers for VAT during a growth push, turnover drops back below the threshold, everyone stops thinking about VAT, and SARS keeps expecting a VAT201 every two months. Two years later the tender check reveals twelve outstanding returns.

The same happens with PAYE after the last employee leaves, and with import or export registrations. The fix is to file the outstanding nil returns and then formally deregister the tax type, in that order. Our guides to VAT registration and PAYE, UIF and SDL cover when each registration is genuinely required.

Fixing a non-compliant status under time pressure

1. 1Read the eFiling breakdown. It tells you exactly which tax type and which period is the problem. Do not guess.
2. 2File everything outstanding first, including nil returns. This is the fastest lever and it clears most cases.
3. 3Pull the statement of account for any tax type showing debt and check whether the balance is real. Misallocated payments are common, and a reallocation request is faster than paying twice.
4. 4Dispute properly if the assessment is wrong. A formal objection or a suspension of payment request under the Tax Administration Act protects your position. An unanswered phone call does not.
5. 5Apply for a payment arrangement if the debt is real and cannot be settled at once. An approved arrangement generally restores compliant status while you keep to it.
6. 6Re-request the status and confirm it is green before you submit the PIN anywhere.

Nobody loses a tender because of the tax they owed. They lose it because of the return they never filed on a registration they had forgotten about.

Rishen Narsing, CA(SA)

Keeping it green permanently

Compliance status is an output, not a task. It stays green when the underlying filings happen on time, every time, across every registration. That means one calendar covering provisional tax, VAT, EMP201 and EMP501, the ITR14 and the CIPC annual return, with a named owner for each.

Practically, we recommend a quarterly status check even when nothing is pending. It takes five minutes on eFiling and it means you never discover a problem three days before a tender closes.

Related reading: unfiled VAT201 returns are the most common single cause of a red status, and if you are on the wrong regime entirely, compare turnover tax with the Small Business Corporation rates.

How Synergy helps

We monitor tax compliance status as part of compliance and reporting, maintain one deadline calendar per client across every registered tax type, and handle SARS correspondence, objections and payment arrangements through our tax services. Where old registrations need cleaning up, we file the backlog and deregister what is no longer needed so the problem does not recur.