Solidarity responded to figures made available by the SA Revenue Service (Sars) who says 13.7 million South Africans paid taxes in the 2012/13 tax year.
Refuting these figures, Solidarity Research Institute (SRI) senior economics researcher Paul Joubert said in a statement actually only 3.3million taxpayers pay 99% of all income tax, while only 2.3million pay 93% and 1.5million are responsible for 84% of income tax.
Joubert says there was a much larger imbalance between the number of people paying tax and the total population than was implied by Sars. What makes this even worse is that it is the mostly the same people who pay income tax that also pay most of the other types of tax such as VAT, company tax, import tariffs and fuel levies.
Sapa reports that although 10.3million people were registered for income tax in the 2011/12 tax year, only around 4.8million were required to submit tax returns. Joubert says 200,000 people could immediately be subtracted from the 4.8million because they had no taxable income. “Moreover, there were around 1.3million people who contributed only one percent of the total amount of income tax for the year.”
Only an approximate 3.3million taxpayers then remained, who were responsible for paying approximately 99% of all income tax. The contribution to income tax of the next million taxpayers was only 5.9%. “When this group of a million people is removed from the total, only 2.3million taxpayers remain, who were responsible for paying approximately 93% of all income tax. When this group of 2.3million taxpayers is reduced one last time, by excluding those who earned R150,000 to R200,000, only 1.5million taxpayers, responsible for paying around 84% of all income tax, remain,” says Joubert.
He did not give a demographic profile of the average tax payer in South Africa. Neither, we promise you, will SARS.
