SARS denies Webnet's tender allegations

Johannesburg, 04 Feb 2004

The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has reaffirmed its position on black empowerment, following Webnet's claims that a tender for hard drives was unfairly awarded to a candidate with lower BEE representation.

The tender in question, tender 19/2003 for storage equipment, was awarded to Comparex Africa, which has 25% BEE representation through a black empowerment partner, as compared to Webnet, which has black representation at management level of 100%.

Complaining about the outcome of the tender process, Saths Moodley, CEO of Webnet, says: "This is for us an issue of principle. Empowerment is a national issue; we are at least expecting that government departments should have standard ways in which empowerment is measured."

Ken Jarvis, SARS CIO, points out that SARS's black empowerment strategy is known to be one of the leading in the country. "The fact that one company did not like the way we scored is not a reflection of the process," he says.

Webnet also raised concerns around discrepancies between the original brief and the final quotes provided by Comparex, but SARS states that the tendering process has been carefully monitored, and it is confident the tender was awarded appropriately.

"We carried out internal audits that showed that the process was 100% clean," says Jarvis. "We have been carrying out these audits since the tampering was discovered in the PC tender process. We have a proven track record of throwing out any suspect tenders."