- The Public Servants Association has confirmed that it has put its national strike on hold.
- The union will meet with the employer on Friday to get a response to the demands it has tabled.
- SARS said operations had been going on as planned despite the strike.
The Public Servants' Association (PSA) - which represents around half of the South African Revenue Service's (SARS) employees at the bargaining unit - has put its strike on hold as it waits for the employer to respond to its demands.
SARS is facing a national strike after a deadlock with the PSA and the National Education, Health, and Allied Workers' Union (Nehawu) during wage negotiations.
PSA spokesperson Ruben Maleka told Fin24 on Wednesday that the union would give SARS until the end of the week to respond to its demands, as its members return to duty, for the time being.
"We are waiting for the employer to respond to our memorandum. We are meeting on Friday ... It is basically the same demand," said Maleka.
Picketing at SARS began in the middle of May, and the strike officially kicked off last week as unions were not satisfied that the employer's commitment to channel savings from 2021 towards salaries would add up to a meaningful increase. SARS said it could not afford union demands of CPI plus 7%.
SARS said operations had been going on as planned despite the strike.
The development comes as a submission to Parliament by the National Treasury reaffirmed that any increases SARS receives in allocation from the fiscus must tighten up the tax authority's operations, rather than going towards wage increases.
Treasury flagged underspending on key projects intended to improve taxpayer satisfaction.
Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana told Parliament during his budget vote last month that SARS would get a R3-billion boost to help the organisation build capacity for IT projects and human resource capacity, among other things.
In Parliament, National Treasury said public comments from the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants expressed concern that SARS potentially had insufficient funds to meet its April 2022 deadline for implementation of Generally Recognised Accounting Practice (GRAP), and that it could not successfully fulfil its mandate.
"SAICA has seen an increase in taxpayer dissatisfaction with SARS's services as is evidenced by the number of operational queries received from our members, as well as affirmed by the Office of the Tax Ombud, where enquiries are up from 5 904 in 2015 to 12 147 in 2021 and complaints from 2 134 in 2015 to 2 967 in 2021.
"An additional amount of R1 billion was allocated to SARS in the 2022/23 financial year, which will be utilised to address the GRAP issue raised by SAICA. The National Treasury will continue to engage SARS on its funding challenges in light of its important work. R4 million was allocated towards the GRAP project, but only R240 000 was spent to date," according to a submission from the National Treasury.
No crowding out funding
During the submission, the National Treasury also told the committee that grassroots civil society group Amandla.mobi complained that the R350 Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant had not been expanded into a basic income grant (BIG) since it was introduced in 2020 to soften the blow of the Covid-19 pandemic on low-income and indigent households.
"The budget allocation for the reinstatement of the R350 SRD grant in 2021/22 was sufficient for 9.4 million recipients, and this has been increased in 2022/23 to cover 10.5 million recipients, a million more.
"A BIG is unaffordable in the current economic climate and would further crowd out spending on existing basic services, pension and child grants, health and education," the submission stated.
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