‘Fire Moyane now’
Judge Robert Nugent has recommended that the suspended commissioner of Sars be sacked, and President Cyril Ramaphosa has said he will ‘apply his mind’ to the suggestion.
Judge Nugent says suspended commissioner’s document ‘littered with abuse’.
President Cyril Ramaphosa is “applying his mind” to Judge Robert Nugent’s recommendation he must immediately sack suspended South African Revenue Service (Sars) commissioner Tom Moyane.
That is according to Ramaphosa’s spokesperson Khusela Diko on Nugent’s interim report of September 30 [seen by The Citizen] as required by the terms of reference set by Ramaphosa in May when he set the wheels in motion for the Commission of Inquiry into Tax Administration and Governance at Sars.
“Mr Moyane has been given an opportunity to give reasons why the recommendations should not be implemented,” Diko told The
Citizen yesterday. Moyane has not testified at the commission, citing “inherent bias” and “gross unfairness” in a document Nugent called a disgrace and “littered with abuse, invective, and sinister suggestion” the commission had prejudged the issues before it.
Nugent recommended Moyane’s dismissal should happen “regardless of what the outcome of his disciplinary inquiry is”.
“What is clear to the commission is that Sars reeks of intrigue, fear, distrust and suspicion. We have heard of it repeatedly in evidence, and we have encountered it ourselves,” Nugent wrote.
“The trajectory of modernisation, that had been in the making for a decade, was summarily stopped when the current Commissioner, Mr Tom Moyane took office on 27 September 2014, and the systems are degenerating as technology advances.”
Nugent said the commission considered it an “imperative that a new commissioner be appointed without delay to remove the uncertainty at Sars and enable it to be set on a firm course of recovery so as to arrest ongoing loss of revenue”.
Further testimony was heard by the commission yesterday of the more than R100 million allegedly paid by Sars to Gartner Consulting.
Gartner spokesperson Laurence Goasduff said the company was assisting the inquiry.
“We look forward to the opportunity to present and discuss this consulting engagement with the commission in the coming weeks. At the request of the commission, we cannot provide further information until this process is completed,” Goasduff told The Citizen.
According to the commission on Monday, information received from Gartner showed the 25 work streams for architecture and technology came to a total cost of about R25 million.
The project for enterprise architecture was R8.9 million and solutions architecture was R7.7 million.
Former Sars executive Andre Scheepers told the inquiry yesterday he would never have spent the money. “Fix the leadership, it starts there,” Scheepers said in response to a question about what it would take to fix Sars, unknowingly echoing Nugent’s report.
Scheepers said a billion rands should have been spent over four years to upgrade Sars’ IT systems.
“I’m told the last major refresh was done in 2014. If there were no subsequent refreshes done of the landscape you’re sitting with a serious problem, you’re heading for a cliff. If you didn’t spend that billion rands, you have trouble and it’s not something you can remedy in a single financial year,” he said. – amandaw@citizen.co.za
Moyane has been given an opportunity to give reasons why recommendations shouldn’t be implemented.
Khusela Diko President’s spokesperson