Tax benefits for employing people with disabilities

Introduction

There are tax benefits for enrolling a person with a disability into a learnership commissioned by your organisation. This involves a deduction at commencement and another deduction upon completion.

These are claimable from the South African Revenue Services (SARS) and is not related to the cash incentive offered by Fasset called the Learnership Cash Grant (LCG). The deductions are outlined below in Table 1.

Table 1: Tax deductions

Example

For example, if a learnership for one learner with a disability starts on the 1^st of March 2018 and ends on the 30^th of August 2019 (18 months) your organisation may claim a commencement allowance of R50 000 from SARS on the 1^st of March 2018. They are then able to claim a R75000 (R50 000 x 1.5) completion allowance from SARS on the 30^th of August 2019. If the learnership is shorter than 12 months the allowance must be claimed pro-rata.

How to claim deduction

According to Fasset, the process to claim your deductions is not an onerous one. To claim your deduction you need to submit the following to SARS:

• IT 180 form required to claim the tax deduction through SARS
• Individual IRP5 with disability status
• Records from which the employees claimed their personal tax deductions

It must be noted that tax deductions from SARS are not the only financial incentives for employing persons with a disability. There are Learnership Cash Grants (LCG), Strategic Cash Grants (SCG), SMME Grant, Assessor & Moderator Grant, Lifelong Learning (LL) events and Project funding.

Please consult the Fasset website for more information, the latest application forms, criteria, and submission dates.

ClockWork specialises in assisting unemployed people with disabilities to find jobs, internships and learnerships. Are you an employer looking to hire an individual who lives with a disability? If so, click here to find out more or send us an email: [email protected]

Did you enjoy reading this article: We have plenty more where this came from! See How To Treat a Person with a Disability in the Workplace.