State Capture—Institutionalized Corruption of the South African Revenue Service
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This study provides valuable insight for scholars, practitioners, and government officials on how a local office of a respected international consulting firm became associated with allegations of illicit influence and state capture. The article presents how political and business leaders used a government agency, the South African Revenue Service (SARS), to gain power, amass wealth, and find protection from prosecution. It outlines how illegal actions by public officials sworn to uphold justice and the rule of law harmed the Republic of South Africa. It also examines how a consulting firm that values integrity and trustworthiness contributed to questionable decisions by state officials. The impact at SARS included: bypassing government procurement procedures; restructuring and staffing that dismantled tax code enforcement; distributing public funds into private hands; and avoiding public accountability. The study concludes with a synopsis of the multiple investigations and implications for ethical behavior in an era of institutionalized state capture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".