An unemployed Soweto woman has fallen victim to identity fraud and now the SA Revenue Service (SARS) is claiming that she owes it more than R822,000 in taxes.
Zanele Tabane, 53, who lives in a four-roomed house in Protea Glen Ext 13, said her family depends on her husband’s monthly pension grant of R1,800 and earnings from odd jobs she gets.
But according to SARS she is the MD of a company known as GRSNDER Enterprise, which employs six people for whom she is said not to have been paying tax.
“The company has been operating under my name and I don’t how they got my details. I have never owned a company before. I can hardly afford to buy bread, how can I afford to employ anyone? I was retrenched in 2017 from an electrical engineering firm where I worked as a plug assembler and my last income was in December of that year,” she said.
“My family and I try to make ends meet every month. If I was an owner of a company I wouldn’t be struggling this much. I'd be living in a fancy house.”
Tabane said she was alerted to the identity fraud in April when she received a call from debt collectors who demanded that she pay R700,000 owed in taxes accumulated since February.
This prompted her to go to a SARS branch in Orlando East, where she was initially told to pay up.
“They printed out a document showing how much I had paid these employees and how much I owed them. I grew so frustrated because I know nothing about this,” she said.
“Eventually I was told that I might have been a victim of a common fraud scam and that I needed to bring documents that reflect my income for the problem to fixed.
“I went to the police to get an affidavit indicating that I do not have a company. I got all my bank records that show that I don’t even have a single cent to my name. I gave these to officials who promised me that they would fix it, but I am still getting calls from the debt collectors who want their money from me. I am scared they might take my house.”
When Sowetan accompanied Tabane to the Orlando East branch earlier this month, officials told her that her case was one of many pay as you earn (PAYE) scams that are under investigation by their fraud department.
Sowetan performed a company search and nothing came up from the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission where all legitimate companies are registered by law. Not much information was available about the company online either.
"I was told that many companies involved in these fraudulent scams were difficult to trace," said Tabane.
According to an employee at the SARS branch, companies would register their PAYE under other people’s names. These companies would deduct money from their employees, but pocket it for themselves without paying it over to the revenue service.
While Tabane waits for the outcome of the investigation, which she was told may take months, she worries that debt collectors might attach the only asset she has, her home, leaving her family with nowhere to go.
sibiyan@sowetan.co.za
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