The South African Revenue Service (SARS) is expected to announce on Tuesday that it has met its revenue target.
The target was heavily revised down from the one announced in 2017 on the back of a weak economy and low tax morality. Then finance minister Malusi Gigaba announced in the February budget that the expected revenue increased from R1.214-trillion to R1.217-trillion, significantly revised down from the ambitious R1.265-trillion target announced in 2017.
The Treasury is still expecting a R48.2bn shortfall for 2017-18, explaining that this reflects weak growth administrative challenges at SARS and increased tax avoidance.
Under suspended commissioner Tom Moyane, SARS has reported revenue shortfalls on a scale not seen since the 2008 financial crisis.
Acting SARS commissioner Mark Kingon said the revenue service has had teams working tirelessly to meet the target, looking to ensure all revenue was collected "in a legal way". He said, ideally, he would like to deliver more than the target.
He said SARS was monitoring cash in real time to ensure the projections were accurate.
"We are doing everything we can to collect to ensure that the [finance] minister can do what he needs to do. Our aim is to do the right thing. There’s still moving points then, you may not have collected everything by April 3," Kingon said.
He said that while these were preliminary figures SARS would be as transparent as possible.
PwC head of tax policy Kyle Mandy said: "SARS will certainly collect the expected revenue but it’s important to note that this is far less than was expected in February last year."
In March, the revenue service patted itself on the back for collecting R1-trillion in taxes by February 22. The organisation said this was the third consecutive year it had reached this "milestone" and "crossed the psychological threshold of the R1-trillion mark".
This left five weeks to collect the remaining R217bn, but February was generally a higher revenue month due to individual provisional taxes, Deloitte managing partner for tax and legal Nazrien Kader said.
Despite SARS’s celebrations, there was still a huge fiscal hole, said Citibank economist Gina Schoeman. She said while SARS was expected to meet its revenue target, it had been revised down substantially.
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