Tightening up on the tax dodgers

THE LATEST pair of TV ads for the SA Revenue Service (Sars) have already started stirring up anger among the commenters on websites and social media. The whingers are all white.

They claim the ad is racist because the bad guy is white and the good people are black.

When are we going to get over ourselves, people? Are white people purer than the driven white snow? Of course not… and there are probably a fair number of tax dodgers in the middle and upper echelons of business.

So I personally don’t have a problem with the ad, which shows a white man going to a tax consultant (MaxTax – guaranteed money back) to try to score some extra off the Receiver of Revenue.

Interestingly, the way Sars has been tightening up, on individual taxpayers particularly, over the last 15 years, I am surprised that even a genius tax consultant can get you much back on your annual assessment (I always have to pay in thousands).

However, the message of both ads – which feed off one another and link to each other in a clever way I can’t recall having seen before) – is that Sars is tightening up on people trying to conceal revenue or lying to get undeserved rebates or refunds.

The one titled “paranoia” shows the white man doing his tax dodging and then getting wracked by paranoia that someone will find out and that everybody knows he’s a cheat. Even at home, with his sweet little daughter serving him tea in a doll’s cups, he can’t relax.

In the other execution, “Because”, we see a single working mom (yes, she is black – so what?) who is also tempted by MaxTax but then decides not to, because she doesn’t want to end up “like him”… and we see the first man again.

It’s a to-the-point message and it shows the stick which Sars can wield.

It works as advertising, so it gets my first Orchid this week.

Well done Sars, ad agency FCB and Velocity Films (the work was directed by Rob Malpage).

Sitting at home on the kitchen counter the other day was a coupon grid from our local Spar. You collect coupons (one for each R50 you spend), stick them on the card and then redeem them for, in this case, high quality knives. I took a look and was about to tell my wife that this sort of thing is just not worth it, because you have to spend so much to get back so little.

To get a R200 discount on one of the knives, you’ve got to present 30 coupons, or R1 500. That doesn’t seem worth it at all – but then I thought again: actually, the R1 500 you spend in the Spar is only R1 300. That’s a real saving. And, in these straitened times, not to be sneezed.

So, to our local Spar (which we love, because – as their ads say – it is run by a friendly team who really are part of our local community), an Orchid. Every little helps.

In a “Month end feature” (an advertising insert) which ran in The Star this week, there was an ad from Phoenix College of Johannesburg, extolling its virtues as a place of learning and urging prospective students to register for the few seats still available.

I only hope that English is not one of the subjects in which they claim virtuosity.

The ad says the college is a “Matric Rewrite Center”. Now we can debate whether there needs to be a hyphen between re and write, but, because we use English English in this country, Center is not correct.

Given that I am wondering what else the college doesn’t know, I have to give them an Onion. isfyingly iconoclastic.

However, I was amused to read your comment about “rubbishy grammar” (October 18) when in your preceding paragraph you wrote: “My wife, not nor mally as cynical as me….”, surely that should have read:”…. as cynical as I am”?

Sorry, couldn’t resist it!

Clem Angus