SARS is saved from Moyane

The DA welcomes the announcement that President Cyril Ramaphosa has dismissed Mr. Tom Moyane as the Commissioner of the South African Revenue Service (SARS).

In the short period of a mere three and a half years in charge of SARS, Tom Moyane managed to reduce the vital entity  from being a world leader in tax collection to being a friend of the ANC’s State Capture project.

In the words of Judge Nugent in the Interim Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Tax Administration and Governance by the South African Revenue Service, “the day Mr. Moyane took office was a calamity for SARS.”

The DA expresses its thanks to Mark Kingon, the acting SARS Commissioner, for taking on the very difficult task of stopping the destruction at SARS and starting to fix the rot left by Tom Moyane. We urge him to continue the valuable work he has embarked upon and therefore ensuring that the path towards restoring taxpayer trust in SARS is not deviated from.

Fully restoring the reputation of SARS in the eyes of the public will require the urgent appointment of a permanent Commissioner of SARS. The identification of a new SARS Commissioner must be completely transparent and must be based solely on merit.

President Cyril Ramaphosa would be misguided to simply rely on section 6.(1) of the South African Revenue Service Amendment Act No. 46 of 2002 to appoint a new SARS Commissioner as he sees fit.

Instead President Ramaphosa must embark upon a completely transparent process to identify the best possible candidates of impeccable integrity and then to take considered advice from a range of experts in the tax and revenue collection fields before determining who the new SARS Commissioner is to be.

Statement issued by Alf Lees MP, DA Shadow Deputy Minister of Finance, 2 November 2018