1 PURPOSE
The purpose of the guide is to assist authorised Institutions to request or verify a clients Tax
Reference Number (TRN) for Income Tax, Value Added Tax (VAT) and Pay As You Earn (PAYE)
via eFiling.
This guide in its design, development, implementation and review phases is guided and
underpinned by the SARS values, code of conduct and the applicable legislation.
Should any aspect of this guide be in conflict with the applicable legislation the legislation will take
precedence.
2 INTRODUCTION
SARS aims to provide the best service to all stakeholders by improving the quality of reporting data
and by so doing enhance the level of compliance linked to those reporting institutions that are
obligated to fulfil their 3
rd
party data reporting requirements as per section 26 of the Tax
Administration Act (TAA).
One of these initiatives is providing an authorized reporting institution with their clients Tax
Reference Number (TRN) upon request.
This also falls in line with the SARS strategic objectives of increased tax compliance and
increased ease and fairness of doing business with SARS.
Reporting institutions have an obligation to fulfil their 3
rd
party data reporting requirements towards
SARS, which includes the submission of a TRN with their correlating data submissions. Taxpayers
are not always aware of their TRN or cannot be successfully contacted to provide this information
and this result in the data submitted by reporting institutions to be incomplete.
In view of this, SARS is committed to assisting reporting institutions by providing the TRN to
them to assist them to comply with their obligation of submitting accurate and complete 3
rd
party data to SARS.
Legislatively SARS can share this information (TRN) as set out in section 69(8)(a) of the
TAA.
Reporting institutions that want to partake in this exchange of information will have to be activated
on SARS eFiling for the bulk TRN request service.
The activation process entails a verification process to authenticate the activation request
for this service.
Once activated, the institution will be able to submit a bulk file request to SARS.
The institution must compile a bulk request via a data file submission as per the SARS
external Business Requirements Specification (BRS) for the TRN request service.
This data file must then be submitted to SARS via the existing Direct Data Flow channels
either Connect Direct or Secure Web: HTTPS channels.
The institution is required to authorise the file processing via SARS eFiling before SARS will
be able to process the file.
Once authorised the file will be processed and the institution will receive a response file once
the process has been completed.
The Tax Reference Number functionality on eFiling has been enhanced to include the ability to
request and confirm Single Requests for Tax Reference numbers as well as to indicate the history
of all Single Tax Reference Number requests.
3 REQUIREMENTS
When requesting your clients TRN the following requirements must be met:
To register for the TRN request service, the reporting institution must be:
Registered and activated for Corporate Income Tax (CIT) and/or Value Added Tax
(VAT) and/or Pay As You Earn (PAYE) on eFiling;