SARS Commissioner Edward Kieswetter says improvements to this year’s tax revenue collections are due to hard work and dedication by the revenue service.
In his 2022 Budget Speech this afternoon, Finance Minister Enock Godongwna announced that tax revenue collections have outperformed last year’s budget projections by R182 billion in the current financial year.
Kieswetter on SARS tax collections:
Kieswetter says more than R50 billion worth of fraud was prevented.
“We have had improvement in the data and artificial intelligence work we do to detect and prevent refund fraud. This year, to date we were able to prevent over R55 billion of refunds, where taxpayers try to defraud the system by submitting a refund claim. That’s R55 billion that could not have been in the bank had we not done this work.”
Social grants
Some grants have gone up. The child support grant has been increased by R20 to R430. The COVID-19 relief of distress grant has been extended for a year.
Delivering his maiden Budget Speech in Cape Town on Wednesday, Godongwana says interventions that the Budget 2022 put forward aim to ease the burden on the poorest of the poor, who are adversely affected by the effects of the pandemic.
Government’s total consolidated government spending will amount to R6.62 trillion over the next three years, with the social wage taking 59.4 percent of total non-interest spending over this period.
Nearly half of South Africa’s citizens receive at least one social grant from the state.
Godongwana’s Budget Speech below:
