Pretoria - The levels of corporate income tax (CIT) collected by the SA Revenue Service (Sars) are only now beginning to recover from the 2008 financial crisis, Sars said on Tuesday.
"If you look at 2008/09, the year before the recession or the year where the recession impacted revenue... CIT was the second-largest contributor during that year," Deon Breytenbach, executive manager for revenue analysis, planning and reporting, said in Pretoria.
He was speaking at the release of the 2014 Tax Statistics Bulletin.
Individuals only contributed R28.9bn more than CIT to the fiscus in 2008/09, he said.
"The impact of the recession on companies was significant."
The difference in the 2013/14 tax year between personal income tax (PIT) and CIT was now R131bn.
"Many of them [companies] went into assessed loss positions and they've only started to recover now," he said.
In 2008/09, CIT contributed 26.7% of total tax revenue. This shrunk to 19.9% by the 2013/14 tax year.
PIT contributed 34.5% to the fiscus in 2013/14, with value added tax contributing 26.4% and other taxes 19.2%.
Of registered individual taxpayers, 40.8% were registered in Gauteng, more than double the next two highest provinces, being the Western Cape at 15%, and KwaZulu-Natal at 14.9%.