The South African Revenue Service (SARS) will lean on technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to not only boost functions, but also improve its integrity.
This was revealed by SARS commissioner Edward Kieswetter, unveiling the taxman’s 2021 virtual filing season for individuals and trusts.
While its ICT infrastructure became the subject of much debate in the recent past, under its current leadership, SARS has set itself a new vision to become a modern organisation of the future.
According to Kieswetter, the organisation has, over the past year, further developed its competency in developing machine learning algorithms and AI to augment human effort.
These efforts, he stated, have enabled SARS to provide its auto-assessment functionality, as well as the ability to detect non-compliance. “Increasingly, it is about improving the overall integrity of our outcomes.”
The commissioner further highlighted the revenue authority’s increasing use of data as an indispensable asset, describing data as the “new gold”.
“We continue to expand our data sets whilst enhancing our capability to employ data science as a formal discipline to extract value from structured and unstructured data.”
Kieswetter indicated the foundational input into SARS auto assessments, the collaboration with employers and third-party data providers − namely financial institutions, retirement funds and medical schemes − provided the taxman with more than 132 million data records this year, an increase from 123 million in the prior year.
“This is a significant data pool. Increasingly, we are learning to extract value from this, imposing on it interrogation algorithms, predictive analytics to improve the overall integrity of our organisation and also increasingly augment human effort.
“As we future-proof our staffing model, our work shifts to knowledge and service work, and a lot of the repetitive and automated work will be done through supercomputers.”
Capable workforce
To respond to the skills dearth within the organisation, SARS announced it was on a recruitment drive to attract highly-skilled and experienced individuals in areas such as IT, data management, legal specialist services, and audit and risk, to name a few.
Foremost among the IT roles SARS wants to fill is that of chief data scientist, chief technology and innovation officer, as well as specialists and senior specialists in data analytics and data science.
The SARS commissioner noted that the organisation continues to rebuild its human capability, to restore some of the capacity eroded in the last decade.
Of the 570 critical positions (of which 200 are earmarked for graduates), 140 are close to finalisation and are in the various stages of the appointment process, he said.
“I’m pleased to announce that we are welcoming 86 graduates to start their training programme with SARS; 26 of these will take part in the CA [chartered accountant] training programme that SARS has. The next cohort of graduates (100) will be onboarded in November 2021.
“Internally, SARS has reskilled 250 service agents to become proficient in more compliance-related activities, such as verifications and audits.”
According to Kieswetter, to ensure it has the requisite skills to fulfil its mandate, SARS has also reached out to the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants to assist with recruiting specialists with tax and forensic experience to help capacitate the organisation.
“We have progressively increased our remote working capability from an initial 3 000 staff at the beginning of the lockdown, to currently in excess of 10 000 (80%) staff enabled to work remotely. These include our core functional areas, such as our service channels, debt management, compliance, back-office processing. Specifically, we have enabled remote virtual agents in our service channels of branches and contact centre.”
The big migration
At the beginning of the year, the revenue authority’s IT systems came under the spotlight when it failed to timeously migrate all its forms from defunct software platform, Adobe Flash Player, to its chosen HTML5 technology.
Kieswetter admitted that subsequent to the decision by Adobe to stop the usage of Adobe Flash Player, SARS suffered a setback that hampered service to taxpayers.
While not all the forms have been migrated, those for major tax types have been successfully moved to HTML5 technology, he indicated.
“We are happy to announce that all forms for major tax types such as personal income tax, corporate income tax, trusts, VAT, PAYE and excise, tax compliance status forms, as well as our registration form have now been migrated to the latest HTML5 technology and can be accessed normally on eFiling.
“A few forms with very low volumes may still be accessed through the web browser provided by SARS and will be migrated by November this year.”
Looking to the future modernisation of SARS, he said the organisation continues to invest in its technology platform, working towards a goal where 100% of all taxpayer obligations can be performed digitally.
“With the increase in taxpayers registering and adopting self-help digital platforms, coupled by our efforts to enable more online services, volumes have grown significantly and continue to grow. We strive to continually predict and monitor volume impacts on our systems and ensure we can manage such volumes by upgrading our ICT infrastructure for critical systems.
“The fact that we could convert more than 450 000 traditional branch filers onto our digital platform and removed some four million previously branch interactions, has proven to be defining.”
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