Taking Advantage Of The ETI Opportunity

  Ehidiamhen Okpamen Economic Development & Policies, Investing

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VENTURES AFRICA – South African businesses that want to take advantage of the Employment Tax Incentive (ETI) can streamline the process by ensuring that they have a solid payroll system in place that caters for the terms of the incentive.
So says Rob Cooper, Director of Legislation Updates and Proposed Legislation at Sage VIP Payroll and Human Resources. The ETI encourages employers to hire young people by reducing the PAYE that the employer is liable to pay to SARS based on the number of young people employed. This reduces the cost of employment to the employer while leaving the employee’s earnings unaffected.
Cooper says that the ETI is a great way for
companies to develop their workforces of the future and contribute to reducing youth unemployment while taking advantage of a tax break. Given the amount of administration it demands, companies should use a payroll package to automate the calculations and paperwork they need to produce to qualify for the incentive.
A good payroll software package such as Sage VIP will be able to automatically calculate your ETI amount in respect of all the qualifying employees. This will make it simple to declare your total ETI for the month on the EMP201 form. Many Sage VIP clients are already using this functionality to make their monthly ETI declarations a breeze.
ADT Security implemented the ETI in January after attending a Sage VIP Seminar about the incentive. “Sage VIP makes it very easy to set up and manage the ETI on a monthly basis so it’s really worth the effort,” says Vanessa Luus, National Payroll Manager at ADT South Africa. “I believe that ADT is among the first companies to include this benefit on its January 2014 EMP201 submission – and we have not looked back since. The monthly reporting and reconciliation on Sage VIP is also well thought-out and makes it easy to keep records for SARS queries in future,” she adds.
William Swatton, Financial Manager at De Keur Group, says: “Sage VIP also does all the ETI calculations so you know how much you can claim back each month. Because it keeps a record of everything, our annual reconciliation is made that much easier.” As a long-time user of the Sage VIP software, Swatton says Sage VIP is always ahead of regulatory and legislative changes such as the ETI, which helps De Keur to meet its statutory reporting obligations.
Karstens Boerdery’s Thea Bekker says that her company has benefited from the ETI functionality in Sage VIP software as well as from Sage VIP’s ETI training. The group of companies saves up to R400 000 a month – depending on how many qualifying employees it has on the scheme in a given month– thanks to the ETI. With Sage VIP, the company is sure that the numbers it submits to SARS are correct, says Bekker. It can also easily answer any queries it gets from SARS about its ETI figures.