SA Revenue Service (Sars) employees have rejected a last-ditch R500m revised offer tabled by the tax agency in a bid to derail a wage strike starting on Wednesday.
The industrial action could affect tax collection at the country’s ports of entry and other services offered by Sars.
On Tuesday, the workers said the revised offer would translate to a wage increase only of 1.3% and a R3,000 one-off cash gratuity.
The Public Servants Association of SA (PSA) and the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu), the key unions at the agency, are demanding increases of 11.5% and 12%, respectively. They also turned down the employer’s initial offer of 0% — no increase at all. The unions’ demands are well above the 5.9% headline inflation rate the SA Reserve Bank has forecast for 2022.
The two unions represent the majority of the nearly 13,000-strong workforce at Sars. At the weekend, Sars offered the unions R70m to fund salary increases and R430m as a one-off gratuity payment for the 2021/2022 fiscal year. The R500m offer was contained in a confidential document seen by Business Day.
PSA assistant GM Reuben Maleka told Business Day on Tuesday that the union’s membership had rejected the R500m offer to break the wage deadlock.
“We have rejected that particular offer and from Wednesday there will be a full-blown strike. We demanded a 12% increase. The R70m the employer is giving us will translate to an increase of 1.3%, while the one-off gratuity payment of R430m would translate to a cash bonus of about R3,000,” Maleka said.
Sars spokesperson Siphithi Sibeko said he had been asked by negotiators not to release information about the cost of the workers’ demands. “We will speak comprehensively when we have everything at our disposal.”
However, Sars’s 13,000 employees cost the agency nearly R8bn, making personnel costs the biggest cost driver in its total expenditure of R11.7bn.
Nehawu spokesperson Lwazi Nkolonzi said the union was engaging its membership on the revised offer of R500m, but stressed they would join the strike on Wednesday.
“We are going to have two national marches, one in Tshwane where our members will march to the National Treasury and to the Sars headquarters. Another march will be held in Cape Town, where workers will march to the Sars offices there,” Nkolonzi said.
Sars head of employee relations and labour, Sobantu Ndlangalavu, said in the document that Sars, like all government institutions, was affected by financial challenges facing the country. The agency did not receive a funding allocation for salary increases from the National Treasury, Ndlangalavu said.
“Notwithstanding, through Sars’s own diligence and initiatives, it is able to make available some funding for salary adjustments to the guaranteed total remuneration packages of employees in the bargaining unit of an amount of R70m.”
Ndlangalavu said this offer “serves as a full and final settlement of the dispute relating to the salary increase demand of the 2022/2023 substantive wage negotiations”.
In April, Sars reported a R16.7bn surplus in revenue from what was estimated in the February budget. A total of R1.563-trillion was collected, representing a 25% year-on-year increase.
In his budget vote on May 18, finance minister Enoch Godongwana said Sars had been allocated a total of R34.3bn “to build the capacity of human resources and implement ICT projects”.
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