Every year a large number of South African employers pay the skills development levy in full, submit nothing, and forfeit the money. Not out of negligence exactly. More because the submission is a job nobody in the business has been given, and the deadline passes quietly.
This is what the obligation actually is, who it applies to, and what it costs when it is missed.
Who has to submit
If you are registered to pay the skills development levy, you are in scope. That means employers whose total annual payroll exceeds R 500 000. Below that threshold you are exempt from the levy, and with no levy there is no mandatory grant to claim.
There is a useful distinction to be clear about. Submitting a Workplace Skills Plan is not a criminal obligation in the way that paying the levy is. Nobody will prosecute you for failing to submit. What happens instead is simpler and more expensive: the money you already paid stays with the SETA, and your B-BBEE skills development element has almost nothing to stand on.
Not sure where your own submission stands? Send us a payroll summary and we will tell you what you have been entitled to and what has actually been claimed.
Request a call backWhat the two documents are
They are usually spoken about as one thing. They are not.
The Workplace Skills Plan (WSP)
Forward-looking. It sets out what training you intend to deliver in the coming year, to whom, at what occupational level, and at what cost. It has to reconcile with your actual workforce: headcount, occupational levels, and the demographic breakdown by race, gender and disability.
The Annual Training Report (ATR)
Backward-looking. It reports what you actually delivered against the previous year's plan. This is where most submissions come apart, because it requires evidence that training happened: attendance registers, certificates, invoices, provider details.
A WSP with no credible ATR behind it is a plan nobody has any reason to believe.
The deadline
30 April, every year, covering the levy year that ran from 1 April to 31 March.
Some SETAs open their portal months in advance. A few have granted short extensions in particular years. Planning around an extension is a bad habit, because the SETAs that do not extend simply close, and there is no reopening.
The mandatory grant is forfeited on the deadline. It cannot be back-dated, appealed, or claimed the following year. Once 30 April passes, that year's 20% belongs to the SETA.
What it costs to skip it
Three separate costs, and companies usually only think about the first.
1. The mandatory grant
20% of everything you paid in levy that year, gone. On a payroll of R 20 million that is R 40 000 a year. Over five years of not submitting, R 200 000 that was already yours.
2. Access to discretionary funding
SETAs hold 49.5% of levy income for discretionary grants, the significantly larger pot that funds learnerships, apprenticeships and bursaries. In practice, an employer with no submission history is a weak applicant. You are asking for programme funding from an organisation that has no record of you training anybody.
3. The B-BBEE skills development element
Skills Development is a priority element on the generic scorecard, worth 20 points before bonuses. Miss the sub-minimum on a priority element and you are discounted a full level regardless of how the rest of the card looks. Without a WSP and ATR, the evidence base for that element is thin at exactly the point where a verification agency starts asking questions.
What a compliant submission actually needs
- Payroll reconciled to headcount, with staff mapped to OFO codes and occupational levels
- Demographic breakdown by race, gender and disability
- A costed training plan for the coming year
- Evidence of the previous year's training: registers, certificates, invoices
- Proof of consultation with a training committee or worker representatives
- A registered Skills Development Facilitator appointed and on record with the SETA
- Lodgement on the correct SETA portal, with proof of submission retained
That last point catches people out. The SDF appointment must be registered before the submission, not alongside it.
If you have never submitted
You start this year. Prior years cannot be recovered. There is no back-dating and no retrospective claim.
What can be done is to get the current cycle filed properly and make sure the same thing does not recur. The first year is the hardest, because the ATR has to be built from training records that were never kept with a submission in mind. After that it becomes routine, provided somebody is keeping the record through the year rather than reconstructing it in April.
Most of our longest-standing clients arrived exactly this way: a phone call in March, a scramble, and then fifteen quiet years.