SARS awards service provider contracts

By Bronwen Kausch, Media strategist, Innovative Media Productions

Johannesburg, 12 Feb 2001

JSE-listed e-business company Hicor is one of five companies to be appointed by the South African Revenue Service (SARS) to e-commerce-enable the department.

The online e-filing service will be available to Absa Bank customers as well as auditing and consulting house, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in partnership with Hicor.

Executive chairman and CEO of Hicor, Danny Pringle, says: "The minister of finance made mention of the introduction of such a service during his budget speech last year and promised the taxpayers that SARS was going to introduce this service and that is now becoming a reality. "

SARS chose five companies out of 10 bidders to facilitate the electronic submission of value-added tax (VAT), pay as you earn (PAYE), provisional tax returns and skill development levy (SDL) payments.

Accenture/PSIber Group, Dimension Data, Hicor, the Pillar Group of Companies and Unihold all emerged with a piece of the pie.

Contractual negotiations will commence on 14 February and SARS expects services to be available from the end of May.

Pringle says Hicor`s system is ready for delivery to and implementation at SARS, banks and other e-filers. The system complies with the functional and security criteria of the banking community, for both real-time and batch-based payment processing.

"The first phase of the SARS e-filing program will cover VAT, PAYE, provisional tax and the SDL. Through the PayBills e-Returns system, we will be able to assist SARS to roll-out new e-filing services to taxpayers as fast as the market can bear and aim to provide a `supermarket` of tax services via the Internet," says Charles De Wet, tax partner at PwC.

Pringle says Hicor only expects to see significant profit from the contract later on, and notes that the company is looking towards profit in March 2003.

"At the moment, we are concentrating on our balance sheet and bringing down our gearing ratio; the awarding of this contract won`t reflect on our March year-ends."