R2 Trillion. A New Commissioner. A New SARS Era.
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On 1 April 2026, outgoing Commissioner Edward Kieswetter delivered his final revenue announcement, and it was anything but a quiet exit.
As the Commissioner pointed out, without SARS, South Africa's democracy goes unfunded. That's not rhetoric, but an arithmetic fact. Think about what that means in practice. The poorest South Africans cannot insure themselves against a broken government. They cannot buy their way out of a failing hospital or a collapsing school. When the state fails, it is the vulnerable who have nowhere else to go. The wealthy have options. The poor only have government.
But government has SARS.
90% of every rand government spends comes from tax collection. This week, for the first time in South African history, SARS collected R2 trillion of those rands, R155 billion more than the year before, in an economy growing at half that rate. A VAT increase that would have squeezed every household in the country was averted. Not by policy but by performance. That is what a functioning revenue authority is worth. And that is what was at stake.
The Number That Stopped the Room
SARS collected R2,010,000,000,000 (R2,01 trillion) in net revenue for the 2025/26 financial year. That's over R2 trillion. It is a first in South African history. Net revenue exceeded Treasury’s revised Budget 3.0 estimate of R2,006.9 billion by R3.34 billion.
SARS’s revenue collection figures year-on-year grew by 8.4%, nearly double the rate at which the economy itself grew. In other words, SARS collected money faster than the country was generating it. For every 1% the economy grew, SARS grew its tax collections by 1.73%. This means compliance is improving, enforcement is working, and more of the money that was always owed is now actually being paid.
To put these numbers into context, SARS has collected R155 billion more this year compared to last. The Commissioner put it plainly: it would take you over 30 years to count to a billion. SARS collected 155 of those in a single year of growth.
SARS delivered once again. The Commissioner confirmed that the 2% VAT increase was averted entirely by this strong collection performance.
Where the Money Came From
The revenue breakdown by tax product tells its own story:
Individual taxes: R794 billion, growing 8.30%
VAT: R500 billion, growing 9.32%, due to resilient household consumption
Corporate Income Tax: R350 billion, growing 8.14%
Customs: R352 billion, growing 3.00%
Excise: R183 billion, growing 7.38%.
Compliance revenue, including revenue directly linked to SARS enforcement actions has contributed R316 billion, or just over 15% of total collections. Within that, AI-powered risk detection models alone prevented R103 billion in impermissible or fraudulent refund outflows. That is not a pilot. That is production-scale artificial intelligence running inside a government institution.
Over the seven-year term, SARS's compliance programme generated R1.6 trillion in additional revenue. AI detection models prevented R672 billion in impermissible outflows. And 1,200 serious tax crime investigations, many linked to the Zondo Commission, yielded more than R80 billion in recoveries, with criminal prosecutions succeeding in 98 out of every 100 cases.
For business accountants and tax practitioners advising clients on tax planning and compliance risk, this is significant context. The trajectory of SARS enforcement has been consistently upward, and 2025/26 confirms that trajectory is accelerating.
Seven Years. One Mandate. A Transformed Institution.
Commissioner Kieswetter took the helm on 1 May 2019, stepping into an institution badly damaged by state capture. Public trust in SARS stood at 48%. Morale was fractured. Capability had been hollowed out. His mandate was not just to collect revenue, it was to rebuild an institution. In 2026 SARS achieved record collection of R2 trillion securing the legacy. Some of the key achievements over seven years included:
Net revenue Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 6.78% over seven years
Compliance revenue CAGR of 13.8% over seven years
Voluntary compliance increased by more than 70%
Taxpayer service satisfaction up from 54% to 90%, and
Public trust up from 48% to 75%.
What Comes Next: Modernisation 3.0
The incoming Commissioner inherits a SARS already deep into its next phase. Modernisation 3.0 is not a fresh start, it is an acceleration of what has been built. Several elements are already in production or advanced proof-of-concept:
Lwazi, the AI virtual assistant, initially launched in 2024 on the SARS website. The next phase extends Lwazi into telephone channels, an AI agent that answers, authenticates via biometrics, resolves queries, and escalates to a human consultant only when needed, with full context already loaded.
AI-powered tax verification is already processing cases. In an evaluation of a full year's worth of verification files, the AI agent agreed with SARS auditors in more than 87% of cases. The remaining cases identified opportunities to refine the models further. Scaling is underway.
Unique digital identity for every taxpayer, capturing data once, enabling full self-service access to tax accounts, registered products, compliance status, and payment obligations through biometric authentication.
Smart Border technology is in advanced development, automated number plate recognition, smart container seals, biometric driver authentication, and non-intrusive vehicle scanning at ports of entry, all feeding a real-time supply chain visibility layer. The ambition is to eliminate congestion, reduce manual processing, and create seamless cross-border trade.
VAT auto-assessment is on the horizon, connecting SARS across the entire value chain to every point of sale, with the long-term ambition of auto-assessing VAT without the need for manual filing.
What This Means for You and Your Clients
The practical read for accountants in practice is straightforward.
SARS is not slowing down. It is speeding up, with better data, sharper AI, and a compliance infrastructure that now runs partly without human intervention. The window for clients to "fall through the cracks" is closing.
For your practice, this is both a risk and an opportunity. Clients who are not clean will be found. Clients who are clean, and positioned correctly, will benefit from faster refunds, faster assessments, and less friction. That's the Goldilocks point SARS is explicitly trying to find: less burden on the compliant, more pressure on the non-compliant.
Your job is to make sure your clients are on the right side of that line. And to charge accordingly for helping them get there.
