Taxpayers: SA boosts numbers

Cape Town - The ratio of individual taxpayers in South Africa to those with jobs is heading in a positive direction. The same goes for the ratio between the number of unemployed and the number of taxpayers.

What is, however, of concern is the fact that the number of people living on government grants is increasing faster than the rise in the number of individual taxpayers.

This information is contained in a report by Lisa Haagensen that has been issued by the SA Institute of Race Relations.

The number of individual taxpayers was apparently 4.3m in 2004/05, and in 2007/08 it reached 5.3m - a 23% increase. In 2004/05 7.8m people were receiving social grants from the state in some or other form, compared with 12.3m in 2007/08 - a 57% surge.

Haagensen converted these figures into ratios and concluded that in 2004/05 there had been 1.82 recipients of social grants for every individual taxpayer in the country. In 2006/07 this ratio had increased to 2.39. In 2007/08 it fell slightly to 2.32.

If the ratio of individual taxpayers to the number of people receiving government grants should worsen, this could endanger the sustainability of the country's social-support system, Haagensen reasoned.

She said that this was a particular problem in an environment where state revenue was on the decline and money had to be borrowed to fund government expenditure.

But in the past two years there has been a positive trend in the ratio of individual taxpayers to the number of people with jobs. As regards the ratio of taxpayers to the number of people with jobs, in 2004/05 there were 2.84 workers for each taxpayer and in 2007/08 this ratio dropped to 2.56.

This meant that there was an increasing proportion of people with jobs and earning enough to pay tax, the report concluded.

- Sake24.com

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