Tax revenue collections in the 2020/21 fiscal year were severely hit by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown restrictions.

This is according to a statement by the National Treasury and the SA Revenue Service (Sars), which published the 14th annual edition of the Tax Statistics on Tuesday. The statistics focus on tax return revenue collections from the 2016/17 to 2020/21 fiscal years.

According to the report, total tax revenue collections for 2020/21 declined by 7.8% to just less than R1.25-trillion from about R1.35-trillion collected in the previous year.

In 2020 the economy had already contracted by 7%.

The compound annual growth rate, measuring collective growth for the past five years, is at 2.2% and much lower than the compound annual growth rate of 9% in 2011/12 to 2016/17.

Sars reported that 40.1% (2,091,559) of assessed taxpayers were registered in Gauteng, with 687,261 of assessed taxpayers living in the Johannesburg metro. These taxpayers were taxed on an average annual income of R481,209.

In terms of corporate income tax, of the 812,306 companies assessed as at September 2021 for tax year 2019, 24% had positive taxable income, while 48.3% had taxable income equal to zero and the remaining 27.7% reported an assessed loss.

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