The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA) says that it was hoping for further clarity regarding outstanding E-toll debt but government has provided none.
OUTA was reacting to the announcement by Transport Minister Sindisiwe Chikunga that from tomorrow midnight E-tolls will be scrapped in Gauteng.
She further said that the South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL) will be able to borrow funding from National Treasury to substitute the funds generated by E-tolls for road infrastructure.
She, however said that all transactions that occur prior to the 12th of April 2024 are required to be paid and will be billed accordingly. OUTA CEO Wayne Duvenage says efforts to get the public to pay the historic debt are doomed to fail.
“The short answer from our perspective is that the public hasn’t been paying, 80 percent of them have not been paying for the last five- to six-years now. So, the question we’ve got for them is what you are going to do about the outstanding debt, because you’ve abandoned all the access to the processes that you were implementing in the past-one of them, the only one quite frankly being sending summonses to the public. A lot of that debt has prescribed, so I don’t think they’ve got any chance in collecting that money from motorists and we advise the motorists that they should not be paying.”
