SARS teams up with AI to beat tax dodgers and bolster compliance /revenue

Artificial Intelligence is helping SARS clamp down on tax compliance, to the tune of hundreds of billions of rands.

AI models have significantly enhanced the organisation’s compliance programme via several high-level interventions, SARS said in an annual report presentation to parliament last month.

AI detection models prevented over R444 billion in outflows (+/- 32% of compliance revenue), said the report compiled by SARS commissioner Edward Kieswetter and submitted to parliament’s standing committee on finance.

Digital technology is critical to manage the country’s tax affairs, which have escalated from a relatively small 8 million tax base in 2007, to 34 million in 2025. In that time tax revenue has increased from R573 billion to  R1,855 trillion, the report says.  

Risk Detection and Debt Propensity AI models assisted in R103 billion in tax verifications “where the risks were flagged through our AI driven risk profiling models powered with Big Data, debt equalisation and refund fraud risk management Machine Learning models -- executing1.7 million verifications cases,”  the report says.

In total, SARS collected R304.0 billion through identifiable compliance efforts In the 2024/25 fiscal year, marking a 16.7% year-on-year increase.  

The SARS presentation emphasised overall improvement in SARS operations despite a ‘challenging operating environment’. These challenges included a proliferation of cross border tax and financial crime, high debt levels & unsustainable debt service costs, and inadequate investment into administrative capability.

Over the past five years, voluntary tax compliance had increased from 62% to 66%, while public trust in SARS had increased from 48% to 75%, the report says.