Vital statistics

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Do you know where your tax contributions go? Statistics South Africa recently released a complete overview of total government spending for 2015/16, providing insight into what government does with your taxes.

According to the latest Financial Statistics of Consolidated General Government report, general services accounted for a quarter of government spending in 2015/16.

Within this, debt payments accounted for nine percent and executive, legislative and financial services accounted for 12 percent.The latter includes the funding of general government services provided by institutions such as the South African Revenue Service, the National Treasury, the Auditor-General of South Africa, the Financial and Fiscal Commission, Parliament, and the various legislatures.

Not surprisingly, big priorities for government are education and social protection which includes the payment of social grants.Together these two items contributed 32 percent of total spending.

Total government spending amounted to R1.52 trillion in 2015/16.To put this into perspective, that's an average of R27 600 per person if we consider South Africa's population of 54.96 million people (2015 estimate).

Almost R129 billion was spent on public debt payments in 2015/16.

In fact, the contribution of debt payments has slowly crept up over the years. In 2011/12, it was 7.2 percent, rising in 2012/13 (7.4 percent), 2013/14 (7.8 percent) and 2014/15 (8.4 percent). In 2015/16 it rose only slightly to 8.5 percent.

Spending can also be expressed in economic terms, providing an indication of how much money was paid towards salaries and goods and services. If we remove capital expenditure from the R1.52 trillion in 2015/16, we're left with R1.37 trillion.

Compensation of employees contributed 40.6 percent of the R1.37 trillion, the largest expenditure item in economic terms.The second largest item was purchases of goods and services, contributing 21.9 percent.

Where did the South African government get the money to fund the spending outlined above? From taxes, mostly.

For every rand of total revenue generated in 2015/16, 86c was received in the form of tax. Breaking this down further, 29c of the 86c was collected in the form of personal tax, 21c from VAT, 16c from businesses, 10c from excises and 10c from other taxes.

Total government revenue, which includes taxes and other forms of income, amounted to R1.35 trillion in 2015/16.