An appraisal of selected tax-enforcement powers of the South African revenue service in the South African constitutional context
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is tension between the South African Revenue Service’s duty to collect taxes on the one hand, and its duty to respect taxpayers’ rights on the other. An environment where there is clearly respect for the rights of the taxpayer may indeed result in increased voluntary compliance. \n \nThis thesis constitutes a comparative appraisal of whether the following enforcement powers of the South African Revenue Service (“SARS”) in the South African constitutional context, namely (i) SARS’ power to conduct searches and seizures in order to verify compliance and investigate the commission of offences; (ii) the “pay now, argue later” rule; and (iii) the appointment of a third party on behalf of a taxpayer are in accordance with the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (“Constitution”). It is argued that these powers do not necessarily conform to the Constitution’s values and the fundamental rights contained in the Bill of Rights in Chapter 2 of the Constitution. \n \nTo address the apparent shortcomings in the current dispensation, the thesis compares these enforcement powers of SARS with similar powers afforded to the revenue authorities of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Nigeria. Important conclusions are drawn from this comparative review and a number of recommendations for law reform are proposed which, if implemented, would align these enforcement powers with the provisions of the Constitution. The recommendations entail, inter alia, that the seizure component of a search and seizure process should be treated separately, that half of the payment obligation should be suspended until the dispute is heard by an impartial forum, and that an objective measure must be in place to ensure that a taxpayer is able to afford basic necessities when a third party appointment is made.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it