Sars says annual tax revenue has doubled over the past decade

South African Revenue Service (Sars) said on Tuesday the annual tax revenue collected had doubled over the last decade to more than R1 trilion.

Sars said revenue had jumped from R572.8 billion in 2007/08 to R1,144.1 billion in 2016/17, an increase of R571.3 billion.

“This is a compound annual growth rate of 8.0 percent for the nine-year period prior to 2016/17,” Sars said in the 10th annual edition of statistics released in conjunction with the South African Reserve Bank.

“The total revenue collected for the fiscal years, from 2007/08 to 2016/17, amounted to R8.13 trillion,” the report said, singling out net value-added tax (VAT) collection among the largest contributors. “On average, net VAT accounted for 25.9 percent of total tax revenue, with net VAT collections comprising 6.4 percent of GDP for the period.”

The report also highlighted that corporate income tax (CIT) had been the third largest contributor to total tax revenue for the past decade.

“It briefly surpassed VAT in 2008/09, but slipped back after the global financial crisis, which affected the profitability of companies. Although CIT has retained its status as the third largest contributor, its relative contribution has declined from a peak of 26.7 percent in 2008/09 to 18.1 percent in 2016/17,” the statistics report said.

Despite touch economic conditions manifested in GDP growth of around 0.5 – 0.7 percent, the tax-to-GDP ratio had stabilised at 26 percent from 2015/16, slightly below the peak of 26.4 percent achieved in 2007/08.

A demographic and geographic analysis of the assessments of the taxpayers who had been assessed as at the end of June 2017 produced a number of interesting results:

Of all taxpayers assessed, 40.2 percent were in Gauteng province, the country’s richest. The report said 623 715 assessed taxpayers lived in the Johannesburg metropolitan area, and were taxed on an average taxable income of R424 083; The gender ratio of taxpayers was 55.1 percent male versus 44.9 percent female.

– African News Agency (ANA)