HISTORY OF FAILED COMMISSIONS
NATASHA MARRIAN: Tax inquiry unlikely to cure revenue ills
Tom Moyane’s investigation was done simply to deflect the heat — there was no way he was going to probe one of his closest allies
The recklessness with which Tom Moyane has run the South African Revenue Service (SARS) since he took over as commissioner in 2014 is catching up with him. There is undoubtedly a need for an inquiry into the administration of SARS, as announced by Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba this week, but the credibility of Moyane’s bosses calls into question whether the inquiry will try to find the real reasons behind the lower revenue collection. The inquiry comes as Judge Dennis Davis is set to deliver to the Treasury and SARS his report on the administration of the agency, as Hilary Joffe noted in these pages this week. It may be that Davis’s report reveals the extent of the damage to the tax agency since 2014, with the departure of its senior leadership and 55 senior managers and a far-reaching restructuring that was not approved by Pravin Gordhan, the finance minister at the time.The inquiry, then, may be an effort to lower temperatures ahead of that report’s release. Inquiries set up by P...
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