The message is usually short and assumes you know what it means. Your organisation has been allocated a number. Please submit your WSP and ATR.
Nobody at a growing company has a job title that covers this. The payroll went past a threshold, SARS started deducting something new, and several months later a sector body you did not know existed is asking for documents in an acronym you have to look up.
So, in order, what happened and what to do about it.
Why is a SETA contacting you at all?
Because your levy is being paid to them.
When an employer expects total remuneration to exceed R500 000 over the next twelve months, that employer becomes liable for the skills development levy and has to register with SARS. Registration runs through the EMP101 application form, and SARS issues an EMP103 notice of registration on success. From there the levy is 1% of total remuneration, declared monthly on the EMP201, with an EMP213 issued as remittance advice.
SARS then keeps 20% of what it collects for the National Skills Fund and forwards 80% to a Sector Education and Training Authority. Which one depends on the standard industrial classification code on your SARS registration, which was set when you registered and is not a matter of preference.
One detail worth checking on the way past. If your payroll is under R500 000 a year but you already hold a levy number, no information goes on the monthly return, and SARS greys the levy field out on eFiling. Should you later cross the threshold, you have to tell SARS so the field is reopened. Companies that grow past R500 000 and assume the system will notice on its own accumulate arrears quietly.
Not sure what your own SETA has actually paid you? Send us a payroll summary and your SETA registration and we will tell you what you were entitled to and what was claimed.
Request a call backThat SETA now holds money that belongs to your sector, some of which is allocated to your company specifically. The documents it is asking for are the condition on which your share is released. It is not a compliance formality with no upside attached, which is how it reads in the email.
What are the two documents?
They do opposite jobs, and mixing them up is the most common early mistake.
The Workplace Skills Plan is defined as a strategic document articulating how an employer intends to address the training and development needs in the workplace during a forthcoming year. It looks forward. It sets out who you plan to train, in what, at what level, broken down in the format your SETA specifies.
The Annual Training Report is a report on the implementation of an organisation's Workplace Skills Plan, reporting on the education and training interventions that were delivered in the previous year. It looks back, and it is checked against the plan that preceded it.
The natural question from a company in its first cycle is what goes in the report when there is no previous plan. The answer is whatever training actually happened. SETAs ask for the report where applicable, and a first year with a plan and a thin but truthful report is normal. What is not normal, and what causes trouble later, is a report describing training that did not occur.
Who is the Skills Development Facilitator, and do you need one?
You need one, and it is a registered role rather than a job description you can hand to whoever has capacity.
HWSETA describes the facilitator as an employer resource who can be an employee or a contracted individual. The core responsibility is to compile the plan and the report and to submit them by 30 April each year, and to monitor both payments to SARS and payments received from the SETA. The appointment has to be registered with your SETA, and the submission is made under that registration.
Two failure modes are worth naming now. The first is appointing nobody and discovering in April that the submission cannot be lodged because no facilitator is registered against the company. The second is appointing somebody who has since left, which produces the same outcome with a paper trail that looks fine until somebody tries to log in.
Who has to sign it off?
This depends on your workforce, and it is where submissions from otherwise organised companies come apart.
Where a recognition agreement has been signed between the business and a trade union, a labour Skills Development Facilitator appointed by the recognised union represents the workplace and signs off on the mandatory grant submission. That applies regardless of how many people you employ.
Where there is no recognition agreement and you employ 50 or more people, a nominated employee Skills Development Facilitator appointed by the employees serves on the training committee and signs off instead.
In both cases the SETA wants evidence that consultation actually happened, in the form of training committee minutes, not just a signature at the end of a document. merSETA requires nominated employee or labour facilitators to be registered on its submission system by the primary facilitator against the specific company, with a signed authorisation document lodged before access is granted, and allows the sign-off to be done electronically.
The practical implication for a company that has just crossed 50 employees is that a committee has to exist, meet, and be minuted during the year. It cannot be assembled in April.
What is the deadline for a company that has just registered?
Better than you would expect, and frequently missed for that reason.
The standard deadline is 30 April, covering the levy year that ran to 31 March. But a first-time registrant does not have to wait for it. merSETA's criteria allow an employer registered for the first time under the Skills Development Levies Act to apply for a mandatory grant within six months of registration. Fasset applies the same six-month rule and treats a company operating for less than six months as new, requiring the EMP103 from SARS as proof of the registration date.
So if your number came through in October, you have a window that runs to roughly April rather than having to wait for the following cycle. Worth establishing early, because the six months runs from registration whether or not anybody told you about it.
What actually counts as training you should be recording?
Wider than most first-time submitters assume, and the under-reporting is what makes early submissions look thin.
merSETA's definition of a learning programme runs to a long list. Structured sets of learning experiences leading to a qualification or part-qualification. Learnerships and apprenticeships. Skills programmes, which are occupationally based and can carry credits towards a registered qualification. Bursary-supported learning. Adult education and training. Academic skills programmes. Skill sets. Credit-bearing and non-credit-bearing short courses. Individual modules towards a QCTO qualification. Student internships in three separate categories. Artisan recognition of prior learning.
Non-credit-bearing short courses are named explicitly as a category where credits are not awarded, and they can still be funded and reported. So the supplier who spent a day on site training your operators on a new machine is a training intervention. So is the internal session on a revised method statement, if you recorded who attended.
The distinction that matters for funding is between programmes that lead to a qualification or part-qualification registered on the National Qualifications Framework and those that do not. The first group is what SETAs call PIVOTAL, standing for professional, vocational, technical and academic learning. The second is non-PIVOTAL, and it still has to address the SETA's own sector priorities to count for anything.
For a first submission the practical instruction is simply to record everything and categorise later. Training you failed to write down cannot be added after 30 April.
What if the SETA contacting you is the wrong one?
It happens, and it is fixable, but the timing is unforgiving.
The SETA you belong to follows the industrial classification code on your SARS profile, and those codes are frequently assigned on incomplete information about what a business actually does. A company whose main activity is civil construction can find itself allocated to a SETA covering something adjacent.
The remedy is an inter-SETA transfer, which moves a company from one SETA to another where it was incorrectly registered. The detail that catches employers is the interaction with the grant deadline. Where a transfer is relevant to a submission, merSETA requires proof that the transfer was approved and that it occurred before the submission deadline. A transfer still in progress on 30 April does not help that year's claim.
If you suspect the allocation is wrong, resolve it well before a submission window rather than during one.
What should happen in the next two weeks?
Five things, in this order, and none of them require a consultant to start.
Confirm the SETA and the classification code on your SARS profile match what the business actually does. Confirm your levy payments are current, because every grant condition depends on it. Appoint a Skills Development Facilitator and register the appointment with the SETA. Find out from your own SETA, in writing, what submission window applies to you given your registration date. And start recording training as it happens, including the internal sessions and supplier training that nobody thinks of as training.
The first submission is mostly an administrative exercise. What makes the second and third ones easy is the record-keeping habit you either started this year or did not.