Parliament’s Finance Cluster says delayed budget adds pressure

Parliament’s Finance Cluster says the postponement of the tabling of the budget last month means that they will work under extreme pressure in processing the upcoming budget due to limited time.

Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana is expected to table the delayed budget on Wednesday. It was postponed after disagreements in the Cabinet to increase VAT from 15 to 17 percent.

“It’s going to compromise lots of processes and we don’t want democracy to be compromised. We hope that next time the Cabinet should do things properly and not dump problems to Parliament,” says the Chairperson Standing Committee on Finance, Dr. Joe Maswanganyi.

Some say government must look into exorbitant lease contracts that cost the fiscus billions of rands.

“We are wasting money, we really are wasting money the government cannot pay 45 percent more for office space than a company. We can’t do that and yet we talk about where money is going to come from and so on, we don’t talk about how to stop wasting money and Parliament’s job is to reckon with those issues and hold the executive accountable to the last point. I want to say is that members say what is Treasury or the AG doing, nonsense. It’s Cabinet’s job, it’s every minister’s job to do that work,” says Chairperson of Standing Committee on Public Accounts, Songezo Zibi.

There are also concerns about the debt service costs which are crowding out spending on other critical services.

“We are no longer making choices that are good or bad, we are making choices that are worse or much worse and that’s where we are at. We are at the peak of taxation, you can’t tax citizens more and I’m talking about personal income tax in this regard because after you start to create tax morality issues where citizens simply figure out ways to avoid tax,” says Chairperson of Standing Committee on Appropriations, Mmusi Maimane.

Some are suggesting that it’s time that the recommendations of the Davis Tax Commission on wealth tax be implemented.

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