There Are Ways To Recover Revenue For Budget Allocations: Cosatu
The Congress of South African Trade Unions Cosatu says there are ways for government to recover the revenue it seeks for budget allocations without having to raise any tax, including Value Added Tax VAT.
This is as Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana is set to finalise a reworked budget ahead of the set 12 March delivery date.
The original budget speech was a non-starter last month , following the leak of an intended 2 VAT increase .
VIDEO Some parties in the GNU are against revenue collection via the proposed VAT increase:The intended tax increase sparked uproar , leading to the scrapping of the budget speech and postponing it to this month.
"We've simply given government a variety of options to look at, some may make sense, some might be quite easy to do, as some of course may not be preferable ideals, but we dont think the crisis is unmanageable. There really is a shortfall of about R24 billion in a budget of more than R2 trillion. There is space to reprioritise expenditure, there is a need actually, to capacitate SARS to improve tax compliance because youve got R800 billion of taxes- existing taxes owed to SARS, to the state and that should really be our number one priority, before we look at other measures," says Cosatu Parliamentary Coordinator Matthew Parks.