’Tax simplification of retirement benefits – an analysis of the tax simplification initiatives for pension provision in the UK and South Africa

Governments across the world are striving to design and implement a simplified tax regime to encourage long-term saving. The United Kingdom (UK) and South Africa both follow similar conceptual approaches in their tax design but have implemented their tax incentives in different manners. This chapter describes the process to the simplification of tax incentives for pension provision followed in the last decade by these two countries. The UK has introduced an auto-enrolment strategy to ensure higher levels of saving at the contribution phase but in contrast to South Africa has no annuitisation requirement at the retirement stage. South Africa is still exploring autoenrolment but has opted for compulsory annuitisation at withdrawal. Given the importance of retirement savings, the success of these simplification strategies needs to be reviewed over time.