 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Mashuru Masutaramute. I would like to welcome you all to the first of the research policy dialogue series under the theme tax and benefit responses to the coronavirus pandemic here in South Africa. This dialogue is a part of a Southern African Towards Inclusive Economic Development that's SA Tide program. This is the first in a series of six dialogues that we will bring you over the next few months. SA Tide is a collaborative research policy making and capacity building partnership between the National Treasury, United Nations, University, World Institute for Economic Development, that's UNI wider, the South African Revenue Service, the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation, the Department of Trade Industry and Competition, Trade and Industry Policy Strategies, the International Food Policy Research Institute and the European Union. The program also includes a number of local and international universities. So everyone, since its inception in 2017, the program's goal is improved economic research for informed evidence-based policy to promote inclusive growth in South Africa and the region. It is a result of a unique collaboration between local and international officials and experts under six work streams, mainly enterprise development, public revenue, macro modeling, inequality, energy and climate and regional growth. So today our main focus will be on the public revenue mobilization for inclusive development work stream, where we will seek to tackle issues surrounding South Africa's tax and benefit responses to the coronavirus pandemic. As we know, COVID-19 has devastated and has had a devastating and lasting impact on livelihoods and incomes not just in South Africa but the world over. So governments needed to move fast and implement measures to mitigate this negative impact that the coronavirus or the COVID-19 has had on society. And this despite a sharp reduction in tax revenues even measured against a decline in GDP. So today our guests will give an insight into the impacts of the pandemic and the tax benefit policies that were introduced in 2020 on poverty and inequality in the country on the basis of a recent large-scale study. So to break down this large-scale study I'd like to introduce or to call upon Yuka Pertula. He's a non-resident researcher at UniWider and professor of public economics at the University of Helsinki. So he'll kick off our program with a synthesis presentation of research findings produced under work stream public revenue mobilization for inclusive development. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon Yuka. You can carry on with your presentation please. Thank you so much. Let's see if I can now share my screen. Can you see my slides now? Okay. So thank you once again. Thank you colleagues for joining. I'm pleased to be a participant to this policy dialogue or rather giving them the backdrop for it and give you a glimpse of what we've been doing in terms of research in the area of public revenue mobilization. So the activities under this work stream include for example that we have people have been writing approximately around 15 studies on tax matters. So there was an open call and most research teams were selected on the basis of that call. But then we also asked that certain colleagues to contribute or asked them directly to contribute to the program. If I'm not mistaken all of these studies actually have South African researchers as co-authors often together with international colleagues but some are solely authored by South Africa based researchers. And what I really like is that many of the papers also have authors from within the administration especially the national treasury and the South Africa revenue service stocks. So in addition to providing these research papers that try to speak to matters pertinent to the development of the tax system in South Africa will also be engaged in infrastructure development or research infrastructure development and training activities. And chief among the research infrastructure activities has really been the maintenance and the development of the secure data lab which is housed at the national treasury. So that data lab offers really I mean I would say world-class administrative data that researchers can access at the data lab. And the data stem from the tax records of the South Africa revenue service obviously the data are anonymized and people can access them securely. And these data have been used for tax research purposes but also otherwise. And then we have also been engaged in the development of research tools especially a tool called tax benefit micro simulation. And later on we hear an example of a study prepared by such a model. We also have been engaged in communicating the research findings by providing research briefs and by organizing events. So let me now give you just a couple of examples of the research findings that have been generated during the program. So it goes without saying that the South African government has significant tax raising capacity simply because the tax to GDP ratio is far above that of in comparable countries. But that doesn't mean that there wouldn't be scope for improvement in terms of designing the tax system. So in the area of taxation of enterprises research under this work stream suggests that not all of the depreciation allowances that are given would really be justified. And it also suggests that the incentives provided by the corporate income tax system are not really geared towards achieving greater productivity growth in South Africa. Rather the biggest incentives are given in a sense in the areas of if you wish old industries. And they are not necessarily targeted at increasing research and development activities in the area of software for example. Thinking of tax enforcement and this research suggesting that in the area of corporate income tax there's also a large tax gap. And addressing that tax gap and also more broadly in order to understand the impacts of enforcement activities we would actually also need to carry out a little bit more research on those activities. Let me now turn to the area of taxing individuals that's for the personal income tax. And we tax economists often think of direct transfers like social grants as a part of that system. So taxing and giving grants to individuals that system needs to be efficient so not to distort too much incentives for work for example. But it also needs to achieve an equitable distribution of income. And in seeing taxes and benefits in reaching the equity goals research really highlights that we would need to think of taxes and benefits as a system. So not every tax instrument needs to be designed with a redistributive goal. It's enough if the system as a whole comprising both taxes and benefits reaches the goals that we want to set for distribution. For example there was a study carried out during the program on the value added tax in South Africa. And the findings of that study indicate that if there was a revenue neutral reform where the zero rating in the value added tax system so starting to tax the currently zero rated activities with the normal rate. If those were policed and the revenues would be used to finance new social grants inequality would actually decrease. So we would be able to achieve a reduction in inequality without an increase in the net government spending. Net in terms of also taking into account the tax risk. So the effectiveness of direct transfers as opposed to tax can really be seen in effectiveness in terms of reaching distributed goals can really be now seen during the coronavirus pandemic. And this is in fact this is a research finding based on a study it just came out and which will be discussed by my colleagues in what we turn next. So thanks that was my set of opening remarks and now over to Yuma Shudu and my colleagues. Thank you very much Yuka for the insight. So maybe if I could just kick it off with one question to you. You've spoken about benefits needing to be extended here in South Africa but do you think that South Africa has enough in its arsenal to continue to increase the tax and benefits system? Well that's ultimately an ethical political question because it relates to the size of the government that people want. Some would like to see a smaller government and others would argue that we need a fairly large government in order to meet all the necessary and developmental goals. And economists alone cannot give direct answer to this. I would see that rather than the overall share of the government from the GDP I would really focus on the quality of the interventions. I mean the quality on what we spend and quality in the transfers. So that would be my comment. So I'm proud that I'm thinking about the overall size of the fund. Thanks for that Yuka. I'd like to bring in into this discussion Christopher Axelson. He's the Chief Director of Economic Tax Analysis at National Treasury of South Africa. Mimiki, she's Leo Law, Senior Official at South African Revenue Service and Dr Gemma Wright, Research Director of Southern African Social Policy Research Institute. So Chris, let me perhaps start off with you talking about some of the tax policy measures that were put in place by South Africa to mitigate the negative impact that the COVID-19 had on households and businesses. Maybe you could just list a few of the measures that South Africa put in place. Thanks, Micheline. Thanks everyone. I think just to start off it's great to see this level of research that's going into all of these policies. All the tax designs, the benefits that have been changing. This whole COVID period where all these changes have been made, a lot of research will come out and it really is starting to come out from the changes that have been made. And then hopefully we can get some data to make good informed decisions going forward. I mean to give you sort of a perspective on what we've done which I think will flow into a bit of the research that will be highlighted later. From our side on the tax side, when the pandemic struck, when the national lockdown was announced, I mean I think the main thing for us was trying to act as quickly as possible. So it was within a week or two that we got those first initial tax measures announced. We provided tax deferrals to firms. We tried to have an expanded employment tax incentive to keep people in their jobs. We tried to do measures like fast-tracking of that refund so that firms had enough cash flow. We also had an additional deduction for donations to the solidarity fund so that people wanted to contribute. They could do so and get a little bit back in effect. It was government providing a partial funding of that solidarity fund. It was quite difficult from the tax system to be able to provide assistance to lower income households. The personal income tax is only paid by the top three or two desiles in the country. So you can't really give tax relief to those on the bottom if they're not paying tax from a personal income tax perspective. So I think a lot of the tax measures we're really are trying to get firms to continue hiring employees. Don't lay them off and give them enough cash flow to continue operating. And then a lot of the poverty alleviation measures were done on the benefit side with the top apps and the additional new benefit grants that came into play. I think it's been the constraint on our side really was very different to other developed economies where they had the space to borrow a lot more at incredibly low rates. It was difficult for us to borrow a lot more. Our rates are very high. So there was this balance that you had to try and strike between how much support did we give the economy versus how much is it actually going to cost us and South Africans in the longer term with this additional debt. So a lot of those then turned into deferrals. So it was about the initial upfront cash flow, but then we do actually get the money back in the end. Some of them were for actual direct relief. So for example, the skills development levy we gave a holiday. So that was an immediate cash into the hands. The employment tax incentive was supposed to be a cost a lot. And we really thought it would have been taken up, but actually the success of the temporary employment relief scheme from the UIF, which was very successful, then almost in effect undercut the employment tax incentive because you couldn't claim both. So that's a broad overview of some of the tax measures. And I think part of this will get into the research that's going to come later. Thanks. Thank you very much, Chris. I want to throw now to Mimiki. Mimiki, you're quite instrumental in putting together some of the research that we are discussing today. Maybe talk us through what are some of your major findings and how that all related to South Africa. You will need to unmute. Mimiki, sorry, you're still on mute. Thank you. Thanks, Mashidi. Perhaps just to wrap off what Chris has indicated around some of the tax relief measures that were implemented and how we see it as the tax administration and how we've costed it or at least how we've seen the measures manifesting themselves, that in terms of what was initially estimated around $70 billion to be both permanent revenue losses as well as liquidity assistance of about $44 billion, liquidity assistance, and $26 billion of permanent revenue losses. What we've seen so fine, this is what was presented in the budget document as well, is that we've seen quite a substantial amount of deferral arrangements that were made by our customs and excise clients, roughly about $24 billion there. With regards to the permanent revenue losses that we've seen, as Chris has indicated, a huge portion of that coming through from the SDL, around $6 billion permanent revenue loss. Overall, we've seen that so far there's about $40 billion that we've given away in terms of tax relief measures. It sort of gives you a context first of all, our revenue outcomes and where we ended up bringing in an additional $40 billion, I guess what was estimated for SARS versus what was the budget 2021 estimate. In that context, there's about $40 billion that we had to assist and facilitate in terms of COVID-19 related tax measures. Coming back to some of the projects that were initiated under work stream 2, which Jukka has mentioned, the work stream 2 looks at public resource mobilisation or domestic resource mobilisation. It's mainly in the taxation space. We have conducted a few research studies. I think the most important one that we're highlighting today is with regards to some of the benefits that we've seen coming through from the additional relief measures, not only over and above the tax measures that were introduced under Disaster Relief Act, there were additional measures that came through from the temporary employer relief measures, as well as new measures that were put in place. What we wanted to get a sense of is what have been the benefits for particularly those that are not within the tax net, what has been the benefit accrued to them, and where would they have ended up had they not received these kinds of benefits. There were other studies that were conducted under this particular work stream 2. I think Jukka has alluded to that with respect to where we see areas of opportunity, revenue opportunities. There were two studies that were done in terms of the tax gap that we're seeing in the corporate income tax space in the non-financial sectors. That particular piece of research is available on our SA tied website. We've also looked at the impact of some of the incentives that we've got in place, particularly with regards to depreciation allowances in place. So this is some of the recent studies that are published on our SA tied website. But I think maybe just to move towards what it is today, why today we're meeting as a showcase. We are then showcasing today some of the work that has been done. It's across many different departments, SARS being one of the participants in this particular study. I think I'll take it back to you. Thank you so much for mentioning that Mimiki. So just SA tied, maybe if I could go back and to tell those who are watching, what it all is, is a collaborative research, policy-making, capacity-building of partnership between the national treasury, United Nations World Institute for Economic Development, the South African revenue service, like you mentioned, at the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation and the Department of Trade and Industry. And we couldn't do all of this without the support from the EU. So these kind of collaborations are quite great when it comes to collecting research and ensuring that things continue to move and new studies are being found. So I just want to also just bring in Gemma at this stage. So based on the collaborative study that's been done in Gemma, how well did South Africa's tax and benefit system protect people financially during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic? Thank you very much, Mr. Frida. Can you hear me all right? Yes, thank you. Yes, thank you indeed. This was a great collaboration that involved people from UNE wider, ourselves at SASPRI, the Salary Research Unit at the University of Cape Town and SARS and the Department of Social Development. And we joined forces to explore the very first part of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa to look at the extent to which the tax and benefit arrangements supported people during that first hard level five lockdown. And what we found is that broadly speaking, the system did indeed, as Christopher Axelson says, it kicked in incredibly quickly and made a huge difference in the lives of South Africans across the income distribution. I've got just two slides to share with people, if I may, relating to the findings of our study. But while I pull that up, just to say, the exercise was undertaken using a tax benefit micro simulation model called SA-MOD, which is underpins by the National Income Dynamics Study, NIDS, Wave 5. And we created two modified versions of it, one that reflects the situation just before the pandemic, so in March 2020. And then the second dataset was modified using the NIDS CRAM survey, which many and most of you will be familiar with, which was a rapid survey of a subset of the NIDS panel to look at the impact on people's earnings and standards of living during the year of 2020 thus far. And what we found was that if we apply the tax and benefit rules to the underpinning population within our micro simulation model, we're able to explore the extent to which people were protected through the different arrangements that were in place. Let me just see if I can share my screen. I'm trying to share it now. Here we are. Is that sharing? Okay. Hopefully. Is that sharing? Yes, it is. Oh, thank you very much. So here's one of just two slides. It shows the poverty rates that we estimated using statistics of Africa's three poverty lines of food, poverty line, the lower bands, poverty line and upper bands, poverty line for the months of March, April, May and June. March is underpins by that dataset I mentioned that reflects life before the pandemic. And April, May and June, we used the modification that took into account the transition of people who were in work, what their impact was for them during the first wave of the pandemic. And using a modelling technique, people in employment in the baseline period in March were reverted into four different scenarios. Either they had no impact, or they lost their job, or they retained their job that had reduced earnings, or they were furloughed. And in the months of April, May and June, we introduced into our model the various additional policies that have been referred to. So in April, we simulate the TERS policy. In May, the benefit changes kicked in. So there were 250 round hikes assigned to the old age grant disability grants, care dependency grants, and the foster child grant. May had one off payments, additional payments made of 300 rounds for recipients of the child's support grant. But then in June, which is why we pushed the analysis as far as June, the situation stabilised in terms of the policies in that the caregiver social relief or distress benefit was introduced, and the top up to the CSD was stopped. So instead, there was the 500 rounds payable to caregivers of children in receipt of the child's support grant, which just went to 7.1 million people. And then in the months of May and June also, of course, there was a 350 round COVID SRD social relief or distress benefit introduced. So if we look just at the poverty line, the first row in this table, it shows that poverty did shoot up from about a fifth of people to over a quarter of people in April. But in the months of May and June, simulating the scenarios in this way, it came back down to broadly where it was prior to the pandemic. Crucially, the assumption that we apply with the analysis is that there's full take up. So if people are eligible for benefits, those benefits are assigned within the model to the individuals who are eligible for them. But the final column is really important because it shows what the situation would have been like during the first lockdown without these additional COVID-19 policies. So without tears, the top ups of existing benefits and the introduction of the new benefits, food poverty would have shot up to about a third of the population. And 45% of people would have been below the lower bounds poverty line and almost 60% below the upper bounds poverty line. So this enabled us to disentangle the different contributions made, the impact on the one hand of the pandemic and the associated lockdown on people's earnings and employment status. But on the other hand, and then in combination, the remedial packages that the government introduced. The high level summary is that it made a huge difference and the South African government acted extremely fast. Clearly, there's nevertheless still very high levels of poverty without the initiatives that were introduced. It would have been a great deal worse. And as such, the systems that were already in place reflect the fact that the social protection system is adaptive and can respond quickly to crises. Ashida, would you like me to show the second slide or shall I pause for a moment? You can go ahead, Jim. Okay. So this second slide breaks it down in a bit more detail by household income deciles. So technical groups of households based on their incomes in March 2020, just before the pandemic and shows the percentage change in household disposable income between March and June 2020. The final bar on the right hand side shows the overall situation for South Africa. Disposable income is people's incomes once they have paid their direct taxes and received the earnings and also any benefits that they're entitled to. So overall for the population as a whole, we found that mean household disposable income dropped by 11%. So that's a little right dot in the final bar. The gray bar shows the drop in earnings. We estimated that disposable income would have dropped by 25% due to the fall in earnings across the country. However, it dropped to 11% rather than the full way down to 25% because of the things that kicked in. On the one hand, the so-called automatic stabilizers, so they're the existing tax and benefit arrangements that existed before any new innovations were introduced under emergency measures. That's the pale blue colouring and that in some cases, for example, for people who lost their work would be reflect the reduced payments of personal income tax. But the darker blue bar is particularly important and reflects the COVID related initiatives. So that includes in fact, so that's TERS, but also importantly, all of the different benefits. And we see quite an interesting pattern across the 10 deciles moving backwards to the main part of the graph. Deciles 7 to 10 all experienced a decline in disposable income. And 6, they roughly the same. But what we see is a very high percentage increase in disposable income in deciles 1 to 5. And the important thing to remember, of course, is that people in these deciles are extremely poor. So a high percentage change doesn't in fact mean very much in absolute rounds. But nevertheless, it does show that the new arrangements that were introduced were targeted incredibly well towards the poorest households. And the reason why we see such an impact on the poorest deciles is that the COVID SRD benefits represented a really big shift in terms of provision of support for people of working age. Prior to the pandemic, if you're aged 18 to 59 and hadn't been a contributor to the UIF scheme and weren't disabled, there was no social assistance apart from the ordinary social relief of distress and extreme situations like fire and flat. However, both the COVID SRD and the caregiver SRD enabled people aged 18 to 59 to receive social assistance for the first time. And I think the caregiver SRD one is particularly exciting for me, given the work I've done over the years on the child support grant, because when that was first developed under the Lund Commission, the state maintenance grant had a component that had many failings, but one positive thing was that it had a component for the caregiver, which was removed at the time of the introduction of the child support grant. So it played a very important role during that first period of the lockdown in terms of actual lands going into the pockets of extremely poor people. Thank you. I'll close down my slide now. Thank you very much, Jim, for that. So we know that a number of these initiatives are coming to an end. They're starting to wind down. The 350 land is also going to be ended pretty soon. So what kind of impact then will that have on poverty alleviation? We've seen that it's had a very significant impact in addressing some of the poverty issues, and it's helped a lot of households. But now that kind of relief is being taken away from the households. What has the study found in terms of what impact that will have on households going forward? I think that's really important, Meshudi. And this, in a sense, is a very positive story in terms of the way governments acted fast during this first wave that took place between April and June. But of course, the benefit hikes and the caregiver SRD were terminated in October, and also the last one hanging on the 350 COVID SRD is due to terminate this month. But even though they're terminating their crises of the pandemic, but also of high levels of poverty and inequality, remain and winter is approaching. And so I think it behaves us all to really urgently explore ways in which the poorest 70 percent of the population can be supported during this incredibly difficult time. And what this research shows is the fact that government can do it. And I mean, with all of the existing benefits, it was, in terms of implementation, a very straightforward thing to augment the size of the benefits. My hope is that arrangements for the people of working age might be formalized more concretely, so that government can respond to crises without the initial flow that had to happen around the COVID SRD and getting people onto the system. And to our audience at home, if you'd like to ask a question, please type it into the chat box. And once we've identified your question, we will put on your camera and your mic for you to ask our guests a question. So Chris, if we come back to you, so maybe give us insight into the governments, what government had to really consider or weigh up when deciding on some of these measures to respond to the pandemic. We've been talking about how the social grants now that SRD is now coming to an end in April, and the kind of impact that we'll have on poverty and households are going forward. But it's a bit of a give and take. So what has government had to give up in order to provide some of these relief measures? Thanks. I think it's governments in quite a difficult position. With such a crisis like this one, with such a big drop in GDP, the scope for government to put money into the economy and get a very good return out of it is really high. In these are the situations where you do want government to act, you do want government to intervene to keep the economy going to really try and reduce the pressure on households. And I think they have done quite a lot of that to a good extent. And this is very good research to show that some of those measures really have alleviated some of the pressure on especially lower-income households. I think from a treasury perspective, which you see in the documents all the time is what do we do about debt and debt stabilization? And it's a very tricky call because you can look at these types of questions and say, well, how can these not be extended? Or how can these grants be reduced? And it's a very difficult thing that government has done by going this route. But we do look at what's happening with debt to destabilization. We've been quite fortunate in the last six months or so that the South African Revenue Service has done very well. We've got quite a bit of additional revenue than we thought, which really will help a lot of those metrics. But there are a lot of other than funding pressures that come onto the budget that government then worries about. And when you read the documentation that we sort of put forward and the budgets and the MTBPSs each year, I think it's trying to weigh up all these different issues. And if you have a debt crisis, the impact on the poor will be probably a lot worse. So you've really got to try and avoid that, I suppose, from our perspective as far as possible, and then do whatever you can within the envelope of what you have left to try and make these adjustments to help households. I think it's been quite positive that I don't think we were overly pessimistic in the large forecast of reductions in growth that we made last year. I think some of the measures did work. And using sort of off-balance sheets measures, which is like the unemployment insurance fund, as well as the reserves within the skills development maybe, and bringing those billions of rands into the economy without having this adverse impact on the overall budget. I think it really did help and it helped get the economy going a bit quicker than we thought. And it's helped with that additional recovery. And hopefully if this recovery is robust and if it's isn't temporary, there is a concern, obviously, that with the commodity prices were sort of in a commodity price boom. And if those soften again, then maybe it will taper away. But if it is a bit more of a robust recovery, then you should see more revenues coming in. You should see more space for a bit more of these developmental objectives to be pushed to really try and help. But if you've got the evidence here, and that's what this research program is about, is trying to get this evidence so that we can chat to all the different policy makers about this is a useful approach. And this was what will have the biggest impact. I think it really would try and sway some of those views. Thanks. And Amiki, Chris is talking about increase in revenue collections over the past couple of months. Well, a whole lot better than what national treasury has expected. Talk us through what SARS has had to do to ensure that at least we get a little bit more money in the kitty, given that we've had a couple of lockdowns, which have had an impact in revenue collections. Could this be because of improved compliance? What kind of compliance have we seen during this time? Thanks, Mashidu. Yes. The revenue outcomes that we announced on the 1st of April were definitely on the surprise on the positive side, bringing in an additional $38 billion against what was the estimate announced by the minister at budget 2021 in February. I think there's a couple of legs that we look at when we assess our revenue outcomes. The first part, obviously understanding the text base, which is in the main, the economy, and understanding that if we sort of track our quota on quota GDP performance since the pandemic, that we went through quite a steep downward contraction. And we've seen ourselves recover quite a bit in the last quarter or so as we've moved through the various stages of the lockdown regulations. So that's the first part as to how the economy performed and how much we could extract from the activities of the economy. Second part of it is the tax policies that are introduced. You would recall that in budget 2020, the tax policies were almost neutral. So the $2 billion that was expected to be lost from the adjustments that were made for PRT were offset by some of the gains that were expected from the excise, the fuel, as well as the introduction of the carbon tax. Having gone through the year, the offset of the $2 billion lost from the PRT adjustments, as well as the increase from the indirect taxes, but that almost was shelved and did not have a material impact in the overall scheme of things, because in the month of June, we then had the supplementary budget that was introduced to take into account the impact of the COVID-19 relief measures. And I think having taken cue from the supplementary budget in June, we've sort of had to also look at ourselves to say, first of all, understanding what scope the tax policies have and the new disaster relief measures that are being introduced that will eat into our revenue collections. And second of all, understanding where the economy is going and that not only South Africa, but globally, that we're experiencing severe contractions in economic activity, we had to look inward within ourselves and strengthen the commitments that were put in the annual performance plan. We had indicated in our annual performance plan that we'd like to at least collect about 7.5% of our total tax revenue from SARS's direct efforts. We call that compliance revenue. And we have put in place activities and measures to make sure that we do indeed bring in the revenue that we can as SARS demonstrate the value that we add as a tax administration. And you'd recall some of you who may have been following the commissioner's presentations during the first week of April where he sort of touched on some of the things that we embarking on. And maybe I'll just touch on a few just so that we give a context to this. In terms of tax avoidance practices, we had looked at refined leakage protection. So making use of extended data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, we went through quite a lot to try and detect taxpayers who may be testing the system to fraudulently claim for refunds that are not due to them. And in this case, there was about 57 billion that was claimed by Claude or protected because of some of these activities that were done in the refund leakage protection space. With regards to customs and compliance, there was a lot of work that was done to crack down on the illicit trade. And also not only in illicit trade, but also counterfeit goods, illicit cigarettes, alcohol, rhino horn and prohibited COVID-19 medicines that would have come into the country. There was quite a lot of work that was done with regards to dealing with some of the emerging risks that we picked up. Again, using a lot of data analysis to look at some of the personal protective equipment tenders that we awarded that did not have, were not associated with tax compliance. And therefore, there was quite a bit of work that was done in that space. I think maybe I'll pause here, but just to give us a sense of the kind of work that we were embarked on to make sure that we can in fact bring in the revenue that we had promised in our APP with regards to SARS's own efforts. But what we also saw more importantly is the increase and the rise in voluntary compliance, where we've seen in terms of our various compliance measures that both individuals and companies pays you and employers, vet vendors, also coming through making sure that they file on time because obviously they would want to access some of the disaster relief measures that were being offered, payments coming through on time, and just a general sense of a lot more positive response as we're going through to make sure that people are able to access our facilities a lot more easier given that we're under strict lockdown conditions. And those who were keen to voluntarily comply really did show up and did make use of the facilities that we had enabled technologically for them to be able to access our services as they sort of can remove service. We've got a question from Ibrahim Khalil Hassin. Is it possible to model for this project what the impact of ending the SRD will be on poverty? Thank you. Really important question. And yes, in theory it is eminently possible to model that. Ideally we would want a more up-to-date underpinning data sets. And for another study we have done that where NIDS has been adjusted to reflect the position of the quarterly labour force survey Q4 2020, which is most up-to-date information we could find. And then to repeat an exercise such as I presented, but looking more at the present day rather than last year's March to June time window and to do a with and without the COVID SRD benefit. So yes it is doable, but we haven't done it in this study. And maybe you spoke through some of the recommendations from the study that you've recently completed for the South African government. Yeah, thank you. I think that one of the important, the really exciting policy shifts that we have seen in providing support for adults of working age really shines a light on how effective that targeting that group is as an age group in reducing poverty amongst the most deprived income desks. So I sincerely hope that South Africa having taken this important step to provide material support for people in this age band will be able to find a way of institutionalising that more formally. So that indeed the other benefits will be more effective for the groups that they're intended. So child support grant wouldn't be so diluted across other members of the household and the old age grants. Similarly, we found for older people for example that food poverty was eliminated in the households containing older people if we assume full take up of all the benefits under the maximum provision that was offered under the June situation. So that would be very much an exciting thing to see to come out of that. And just secondly the COVID SRD benefit was a small amount of money, but it did make a big difference in people's lives. But it's eligibility criteria were extremely stringent. You had to be unemployed and to have zero income and which was checked in people's bank accounts that they literally had zero coming in. Whereas it would be good to bring that more into line at the least with other types of benefits within the South African system for which there's a means test that is above zero. But again, of course that would cost more, but it would bring it more into line with other benefits. Our speakers are here for you to ask questions. So if you do want to ask a question, please pop your question in the chat box. We do still have some time to take some of your questions at this point. So please feel free to populate your question in the chat box or alternatively you can try raise your hand, put down your name and we'll unmute you so you can ask the speakers a question. Yuka, I just wanted to ask you about these kinds of collaborations and the importance of the collaborations when it comes to we've got the national treasury collaborating with uni wider IFRIP and other departments within the economic cluster. We know that the work of Issei Tide has been generously supported by the United Nations, so we are very much grateful for the support, but maybe talk us through the importance of such collaborations when it comes to research. Thank you, Mashudo. Yes, so this is research that tries to be as relevant as possible for the for the policymaking in a country. So for researchers is a unique opportunity to interact with policymakers and really try to try to work on things that can make a difference. And I do hope that they also realize that policymakers and people who are South African government officials are extremely busy with the day-to-day work, but I do hope that they can also benefit in terms of being part of the of the research groups. So in my understanding, and in my experience, this is one of the, this is for one research project that really, I mean, has brought together in a completely new way researchers and policymakers working on same papers together, co-authoring and then hopefully providing credible and useful evidence. Thank you very much for that. We've got a question from Anthony. He's asking, may you clarify or this question is to Yuka. May you clarify on the point from Yuka's presentation that says despite the significant tax capacity, scope for improvement exists, does this point suggest that South Africa's tax system has capacity to accommodate further interventions to assist the poor? Yeah, thanks for that. So that wouldn't really be a tax intervention. It would rather be an intervention via the benefits side. And where then tax comes into the picture is, I mean, by financing some of these activities. But obviously now, I mean, I do say the view that Chris pointed out that I mean now, hopefully soon, we are moving towards the post pandemic world and then we need to also start to worry about doing financing the deficit and reducing it in order to be prepared for the next crisis. So we need to start thinking of what are the really the crucial benefits, what are the really crucial tax expenditures and and from where we could perhaps make some cuts in order to improve the fiscal situation. But that's a situation which is the same across the whole world. So in that sense, we are in the same boat in almost all countries. I've got a question for Mimiki. It's from Peter Tartman-Talto. He's asking that you lay out more detail on the son's own efforts revenues and how much this has moved tax collection last year and how it might improve in the next or in the three years ahead. Thanks for that question, Peter. So the details around SAS's own efforts like I indicated earlier on maybe let me take a step back just in terms of SAS's mandate and where we fit into the overall fiscal picture. You would be aware that we are responsible for collecting almost 90 percent of consolidated national revenue. So for us, the achievement that we saw in the financial year end that has just passed now, the additional almost 40 billion that we collected does make quite a bit of an improvement in terms of our overall consolidated national revenue space. And again in line with the vision 2024 that the commissioner has indicated that the five years that he's been given to turn around SAS, one of the things that he wants to do is to make sure that we encourage voluntary compliance as much as possible. And to that extent, there are about nine strategic objectives that have been crafted by SAS with the intent of pushing a lot more South Africans towards this culture of voluntary compliance. Now, one of the objectives there, it talks about expanding and increasing the use of data to improve the integrity and develop insights and improve key performance outcomes. Why I'm mentioning this is not only do we live up to this particular objective five in terms of the day-to-day work that we do, making sure that when we do follow up on some of the areas of non-compliance that we need to strongly target on, that it is based on data and evidence. And therefore, to that extent, there are a lot of things that we've identified in our performance plan that we've sort of said we will target and focus towards to make sure that we leave no room for areas of non-compliance and that we are hard on those who are non-compliant and we've got activities that are lined up to make sure that we deal with areas of non-compliance that we've identified. To that extent, in the 2020-21 financial year that has just passed up indicated some of the areas where we've particularly targeted and we've worked through to make sure that not only do we bring in additional revenue but we also mitigate against possible fraud against the fiscal. With regards to where we are heading in the next three years, I think in our annual performance plan, again in our strategic plan, we do talk of a couple of areas that we want to focus on. The first one being the work that is being conducted by the Davis Tax Committee. You are aware that in the past two years, we have requested the Davis Tax Committee to sort of re-initiate some of the work that they started. And this time around, one of the things that we sort of worked towards is to having specific recommendations that SARs as a tax administration institution can start acting on as and when the Davis Tax Committee identifies areas of either policy improvements that can be worked on and or tax administration improvements that can be worked on. So there is a lot of work that has started with Judge Dennis Davis. The report that they conducted on the tax gap has been tabled. So there's a lot of revenue recovery program work that has started and will continue informed by the report that the Davis Tax Committee is working on. As you are aware that certain parts of the SARs were decommissioned in the past few years and those that were decommissioned have now been re-initiated and or amplified. Obviously, there's a lot of work in the large business, large business and international businesses that we're working on. We have re-initiated the LBC a few years ago. We announced already that we re-establishing the business unit as a centralized unit to make sure that it deals with all tax matters over large businesses end to end from the beginning right up to the end. One of the other areas that we're working on and improving on and it's around the criminal and illicit economic activities. We are aware that there is a unit that has now been set up to particularly follow up on this particular part of our economy to make sure that those who are sort of the net are brought into the net and those who have been defrauding the tax system are brought to book. I think also as you are aware we have lost quite a lot of resources in the past few years and you would have seen in recent times advertisements being announced by the by SARS indicating that we are now recruiting and hiring resources to make sure that we bring in all the revenue that we can with all the capability that we require and therefore in the next three years part of the ex-additional funding that we've received from national treasury it's working towards bolstering our own capabilities to make sure that we can bring in the maximum revenue or optimized revenue collections as the SARS act demands of us. I think I'll stop here. Thank you very much. We have come to the end of our program this afternoon. So what I wanted is for a nice wrap. So I'll give the speakers or panelists just a minute to give a few closing remarks. We can start off with you Mamikina that's you're still on the floor just the closing remarks just a minute if or even less. Thank you. Thanks Mashidu. I think the work that we've been involved in on the SA tied program truly speaks to not only SARS's ethos and principles around making sure that the data that we work with or the information that advises the policy that we take the actions that we take text administration actions that we take are informed by evidence and informed by data and I think like I mentioned one of the objectives that we talk about in objective five is around appreciating the use of data in order to deliver results and for us it's supporting an initiative such as this is a type program and particularly providing the necessary data anonymize secure data to allow allow researchers and to allow analysts to actually look at our own text administration data and lead us to areas where we can improve and not only SARS is a text administration but also for treasury and other government departments around how to better design policies and how to better implement some of the areas for broader improvement but I think we're also sort of following international best practice where text administration data is being used almost as a supplement to other data sources such as surveys national accounts and other statistical data so for us it truly has been quite a useful exercise and it's quite an honor for us to be involved with this this particular program but because it has also allowed us as SARS to make sure that we bring in some of our young professionals to be involved with some of the research programs and therefore getting gaining access not only to local peers but also to international academia and international practitioners who would help us shape some of the research agenda some of the some of the work that we need to think about and implement as the text authority and I think just as a last point is just to indicate some of the successes that you've seen in the essay type program is that we have seen the program awarding around 14 phd scholarships across the various clusters that are involved six that were awarded at national treasury five that were awarded at SARS and three for the DTI and I'm quite pleased to report that from SARS's perspective of those five bursaries that were awarded for the phd scholars we already have one who has graduated in the first quarter of this 2021 so it's really appreciative of the platform that has been given not only to our staff members but also to our colleagues in government to be able to step up our own capability and be able to deliver some of the work in a way that is much more optimized and a much more enriched and a lot more informed thank you thank you very much Namiki. Gema you are next. Just briefly from me I'd like to say that this program that's with the support of the European Union and and and the all of the different stakeholders involved has been an or known a privilege to be part of it and then involved in projects such as the one I spoke a little bit about earlier and especially in terms of the way in which researchers and civil servants are invited to work together and pull their knowledge and expertise and experiences as as colleagues in the collective exercise it's a very special opportunity to be part of that thank you thank you very much Gema Yuka. Thanks so I would just like to second what my colleague said that the I really think that the the data access has been really the ground jewel of the one of the ground jewels of the program and I think I mean it's also served as a role model for some of the neighboring countries and so they want to achieve something similar that the South Africa already has up and running but has still always within the continent so as a researcher I would hope that we can continue and continue further developing it and and there's a possibility to have even more granular data and and and I think we can make make progress with with this data and and even better data what I would like to see a little bit more would be perhaps some experimentation with respect to to to different arrangements so those we haven't yet seen but there could be a possibility to learn even more. Thank you very much and last but not least but Chris. All right thanks Michelle I mean I just like to say thanks to you know all the researchers everyone involved you know tax policy doesn't usually get that much attention especially some of the more arcane or some of the more unknown elements in the tax legislation and now with this data available you can look at things like depreciation allowances per anonymized firm and you can look at some of these other aspects it really not much light has been shown on them before so it really helps us you know we don't have unlimited resources and government to then research all these issues and actually find out what's going on there so suddenly to have you know it's almost free resources coming in to look at all this data and provide some insight into it really does help us I think it also helps just because they're independent I mean they might be co-authored with the government official but they're independent papers and so this isn't government trying to put forward a particular stance particular view on some of these points and they can say what they need to say which is very useful and then it can help guide the discussion so I think it's been it's really useful I hope we can do more get more interesting insights and try and push some of these and these new agendas and new potential policy frameworks for it so thank you very much a very big thank you to all our panelists this afternoon thank you so much for joining us this afternoon and all the insights that you have given during this hour but I'd also like to give a big thank you to all our official partners without whom this would not have been possible so we're starting off with the United Nations University World Institute for Economic Development UniWider the National Treasury the South African Revenue Service the Department of Planning Monitoring and Evaluation the Department of Trade Industry and Competition Trade and Industry Policy Strategies the International Food Policy Research Institute and most of all the European Union for their continued commitment and invaluable financial support for this very important program and a big thank you to you our audience for joining us and taking the time out this afternoon to listen to our discussion but do look out for the next date of for our second dialogue and the series thanks you once again to everyone who participated and joined us from home and hopefully we'll see you at the next one have a lovely afternoon