The Organisation for Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) accused the South African National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) of misrepresenting their outstanding debt with regards to the e-toll system today (Monday).
This follows on the heels of transport minister Joe Maswanganyi’s update on the e-toll situation in parliament last week.
“Our assessment of Sanral’s latest reporting indicates they are not accounting for e-toll revenues billed at the punitive tariffs, but instead are reflecting their invoicing and outstanding revenues at the discounted e-tag rates,” said Outa chairperson, Wayne Duvenage.
Outa’s chief operating officer, Ben Theron, told FTW Online that there were different levels of payment required for a single route when travelling through the gantries, depending on how late you pay the money owed and the penalties involved.
He pointed out that the organisation believed that Sanral was quoting lower numbers than had been reported at the end of 2016 by only reflecting the debt owed without these penalties – at the discounted rates – in order to look better by seemingly being owed less than the actual debt incurred.
At the discounted value, Sanral would still be owed around R9.2 billion as of the end of March 2017 and Outa believes that they will not be able to collect a meaningful portion of this debt.
Duvenage pointed out that 74% of the e-toll income received from motorists since its inception was paid to the Austrian-owned electronic toll collection company, Kapsch TrafficCom.
“This is a clear indication of how irrational the scheme has become - and what makes matters worse is [that] the compliance levels continue to decline year-on-year,” he said. “This is clearly a problem for Sanral and explains why their bond auctions are not attracting any investors, pushing this state-owned entity to the brink of financial failure.”
