How to appoint a SARS Public Officer

All companies are required by law to appoint a Public Officer within one month of the company’s date of incorporation. Failure to appoint a Public Officer within the designated time frame will result in non-compliance. The Public Officer is required to be a South African resident and is in essence the face of the company. Either a director (in the case of Closed Corporations) or the Company Secretary may act as the company’s Public Officer. If there is a change of Public Officer, the company must notify SARS within 14 days to avoid hefty fines.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Step 1: Navigation
• Step 1.1: Role Guards
• Step 2: Choose Individual
• Step 3: Personal Details
• Step 4: Appointment Date
• Step 5: Document Overview
• Step 6: Digital Signature & Document Upload 
• Step 7: Dashboard update

Step 1: Navigation

From your company dashboard, navigate to the SARS tab and click "Appoint Public Officer"

Step 1.1: Role Guards

The platform has "guards" in place throughout each workflow, to ensure that all the information required for that specific workflow, is available in the system. In this case, if you have not yet uploaded your Company Registration certificate as part of your organisation's onboarding, you will be redirected to go do so, as in the example below.

Step 2: Choose Individual

By typing in the individual's ID number, Intersect will allow you to search from its existing database [if the user already exists in our system], or through an external data search, such as The Department of Home Affairs. Select the applicable data connection, and click "Next".

Step 3: Personal Details

You will note that based on your data source chosen in the previous step, all the relevant data will now populate your application. You may need to complete some outstanding fields for which we were unable to retrieve any data.

Step 4: Appointment Date

Select the appointment date and place of signature, then click Appoint Public Officer.

Step 5: Document Overview

Intersect will automatically create an ordinary resolution and letter of consent. You can preview these documents directly from within the confirmation modal below. They are also automatically added to your "Task Manager" section, where the digital signature workflow needs to be completed. [Refer Step 6]

Step 6: Digital Signature & Document Upload
 

You'll notice a task being added to the user's "Task Manager" section, where the user will be required to digitally sign the "Consent to Act" and "Ordinary Resolution" as well as upload the outstanding documents to complete this workflow.

Step 7: Dashboard update

Once your submission is completed, you will note that your SARS dashboard has now been updated with the Public Officer's details.

Last Update: 31 March 2024