The South African Revenue Service's (SARS's) "single view of the taxpayer" project, expected to save it about R1 billion this year, has drawn the attention of tax authorities overseas.
Andr'e van der Post, SARS technology and innovation manager, says UK Inland Revenue & Customs is looking at the project, as well as authorities in Sweden and Australia.
SARS administers eight core taxes. Although a group with a holding company, branches and subsidiaries might in total have hundreds of different tax registrations within the system, in the past, these registrations were seen in isolation.
While the group might be paid a value-added tax (VAT) refund, it might owe SARS more than that in income tax. The new project, which involved technology partners Siebel, Accenture, Bateleur and IBM, allows SARS to have a single view of the taxpayer across all legal entities and tax registrations.
This allows SARS, among other things, to refuse a VAT refund until another tax has been paid.
New features
The solution uses an interface based on Siebel's Universal Application Network, together with a set of objects specific to SARS. It is driven by a database populated with taxpayer information and a search engine from Bateleur and Search Software America (SSA) allowing for fuzzy logic searches.
"[SSA] didn't just bring technology, but domain knowledge. They were able to help us in the area of rules definition and logic that would have taken us months. When you get the logic wrong, you destroy credibility."
Van der Post says various entities have implemented aspects of the project, "but none of them have yet taken the whole thing on". He adds that various foreign authorities have asked for SARS's assistance and this is being provided.
He says SARS is now embarking on implementing new features within the project that will allow it, for example, to understand the relationships between individuals, between corporations, and the relationships between individuals and corporations.
Understanding relationships is important to the tax authority, since it believes that if an individual who is a corporate officer is not complying fully with tax regulations, there is a good chance that his corporation is also not compliant.
Among the 40 new areas of functionality being rolled out in the near future, one includes allowing the call centre to be able to tell taxpayers exactly where their returns are in the assessment process.
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The all-seeing SARS
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