Tax practitioner obligations

CPD hours for tax practitioners

Tax practitioner obligations

Members who are tax practitioners must ensure that the personal details on their SAICA profiles are up to date (this may be updated via the SAICA Member Portal) and that they are subscribed to either the Standards and Legislation newsletter or Integritax newsletters on the Subscriptions page of the SAICA website. Please log in to the SAICA Member Portal to log a case (query) for assistance with the subscription process, if necessary.

Tax Practitioners must submit the tax practitioner annual declaration on the SAICA Member Portal to report on compliance to CPD, SAICA’s code of ethics and criminal convictions in respect of the offences described in section 240(3) of the Tax Administration Act.

If you registered for the first time as a CA(SA), AGA or AT(SA) in the current calendar year, you must still submit an annual declaration and keep your own record of your CPD activities undertaken which will need to be presented if you are selected for monitoring. The requirement to comply with CPD applies from the date of registration as a tax practitioner.

Members over the age of 65 also need to adhere to these requirements if they are tax practitioners.

CPD hours for tax practitioners

Tax practitioners must ensure that they fully understand the CPD obligations that need to be complied with by 31 December every year and that they are on track to attain this. Please note that no extensions to comply will be granted. If you find that your CPD hours are lacking, please institute interventions immediately to ensure that you are compliant by 31 December every year.

Tax practitioners must meet the minimum of 18 verifiable CPD hours annually, consisting of the following:

10 tax hours;
2 ethics hours; and
6 hours relating to the service provided by the individual – e.g. audit, financial reporting, etc. If the tax practitioner provides only tax services, then presumably additional tax CPD hours will fulfill this requirement (attending training for the service provided i.e. tax, audit, financial reporting training). Tax practitioners must obtain proof of attendance e.g. a certificate showing CPD hours and attendance registers.

Note that, if you only registered as a tax practitioner during the course of the current year, your CPD requirement will be apportioned based on the number of months during the year for which you were registered. If you are applying for the apportionment, please also submit the SARS letter that you should have received as proof of your registration as a tax practitioner as evidence of the date of your registration.

As imposed by SARS, SAICA is required to verify at least 20% of its tax practitioner members’ CPD records annually. Tax practitioners must retain their CPD records for a period of 5 years.

Note that if you are selected for monitoring, you will be required to log in to the SAICA Member Portal and upload the records of CPD as well as related evidence.

A list of CPD activities may be captured in a PDF, Word, PowerPoint or Excel spreadsheet format.

The concept of verifiability is that the learning activity can be objectively verified (i.e. by someone with no direct or vested interest in the learning activity) by a competent source (i.e. someone who can provide a true and fair representation that the learning activity has taken place)

Verifiable CPD documents

Evidence of verifiable CPD as reflected on your CPD activity list could include certificates of courses attended, attendance registers verified by third parties, letters or emails from third parties confirming the CPD learning activity and your participation in such activity.

Tax practitioners are required to provide verifiable evidence in terms of the tax legislation requirements for tax practitioners (SAICA is an RCB and is required to enforce and verify this on behalf of SARS).

CPD activities hosted by SAICA

SAICA considers verifiable evidence for tax practitioners to be the following:

Delegates who book and attend live SAICA webcasts or face-to-face events will automatically receive a confirmation of attendance email confirming the registered delegate attended the stated webcast / event and the duration of the webcast / event.
If you are unable to attend the live event, then you are able to watch the recording on the SAICA eVolve platform – in this case you must complete the assessment and submit this as evidence. Where you are watching a recording of a past event and not a live event or you have read a SAICA CPD article, no certificate of attendance will be issued, and you will have to obtain the completion certificate to serve as verifiable CPD. To obtain a completion certificate, you need to successfully complete the relevant assessment and attained a pass mark of 75% on the SAICA eVolve platform, after having watched the entire recording of the relevant session. You can then download the completion certificate on the SAICA eVolve system.
If you read an Integritax article, then the assessment must be done on eVolve and results and the confirmation of completion certificate must be downloaded as verifiable CPD confirmation. The pass mark needed to obtain the certificate is 75%.
The learning and assessments must have taken place in the period under review (1 January – 31 December annually) – the reports must therefore reflect that this was completed during the relevant period.

Tax Compliance Status

Individuals applying to be registered as tax practitioners for the first time will be required to submit as part of their application a valid tax compliance status letter (PIN) or a screenshot of your personal Compliance Dashboard, which is available on your eFiling profile.

As part of the annual tax practitioner membership renewal, SAICA verifies the tax compliance status once a year.

Proof of criminal status
Individuals applying to be registered as tax practitioners for the first time will be required to submit as part of their application, an independently verified criminal certificate to SAICA, e.g. provide a police clearance certificate from the South African Police Services (SAPS). If members prefer, they may use the service of a reputable criminal record checking company as an alternative, many of which are available throughout South Africa.

Once the individual has been registered as a tax practitioner, a sworn affidavit must be submitted to SAICA once every five years indicating that the criminal free status remains unchanged or at shorter time period as specified by RCBs.