A senior lecturer at the African Tax Institute at the University of Pretoria, Dr. Sansia Blackmore, says tax bargaining would further improve tax compliance in the country.
This comes after the South African Revenue Service (SARS) said it had surpassed its revenue collection target for the 2023-2024 financial year.
The tax revenue collected more than R 1.74 trillion which is R 54 billion more than last year’s revenue collected.
Blackmore says SARS needs to do more to discourage people from evading tax.
She says, “ We’ve got a negative tax governance link. So we’ve got very high taxes given our status relative to our African peers for instance. Our tax to GDP ratio compares quite favourably with OECD countries except on the governance metrics.”
“On governance and accountability, we perform very poorly. So we have a negative link and the concern is that the only way to correct this would be to have an institutional environment where there’s actually tax bargaining allowed to take place. There’s got to be engagement and it has to be a space of contestation and corporation as one would expect in a constitutional democracy.”
