The road to rebuilding Sars after Tom Moyane
The unceremonious axing of Tom Moyane spells an end to a ruinous four-year tenure in which the former prisons boss created an aura of fear and anxiety at the SA Revenue Service. It culminated in a drop in tax compliance, and a R49.7bn hole in the country’s accounts. But the question now, with Moyane gone, is how can the institution be fixed? And who can do it?
The date is Sunday October 13 2013. SA’s former prisons boss, an economist named Tom Moyane, is holding his first meeting with Vittorio Massone, a smooth-talking Italian consultant representing Bain & Co. The meeting is at the Melrose Arch offices of the Boston-based consultancy. Massone had been introduced to Moyane by soap opera producer Duma Ndlovu, a mover and shaker who had also introduced the ambitious consultant to incumbent President Jacob Zuma. Moyane, too, had always been ambitious. And, fittingly for him, the SA Revenue Service (Sars) had just lost its commissioner, Oupa Magashula, and Moyane had his eye on the job. Massone was to be the man to help Moyane succeed once he got it. Of course, neither Moyane nor Massone had an inkling of the complexity and intricacies of running a world-class tax agency. But on that Sunday afternoon they sat down to map out Sars’s fate. In September 2014, the plan fell into place and Zuma appointed him to head the revenue agency. Fast-forwar...
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