After SARS recently "enhanced" their Tax Clearance Certificate (TCC) process, anyone applying for an Approval International Transfer (AIT) will have noticed that what used to take around 5 days now increasingly exceeds the 21 working day turnaround time that SARS gives as a guideline. SARS no longer permits follow-ups prior to the 21 working day turnaround time being exceeded. 

This means that anyone partaking in Crypto Arbitrage that has used their R1m Single Discretionary Allowance (SDA) and applies to use a portion of their of R10m Foreign Investment Allowance (FIA) now has to wait for up to potentially over a month before they get issued with an AIT PIN in order to go ahead with their arbitrage trades. Despite SARS advising that more than one AIT application can be loaded on e-Filing at a time, every time this has been tested it has resulted in failure with SARS flagging them as duplicate applications. In this case current applications were also rejected leaving applicants with no application and at a massive opportunity cost loss. 

This single inefficiency has bottlenecked the entire Crypto Arbitrage process and has resulted in many players missing the spread upticks that arbitrage takes advantage of to make trades extremely profitable. In addition this lost revenue is also taxable meaning SARS too, loses out on their piece of the action. We hereby request the SARS  Commissioner, Mr Edward Kieswetter to immediately put in place structures that permanently address the backlog and streamline the AIT approval process for Crypto Arbitrage applications. Arbitrage is good for investors, SARS, and the South African economy at large.