Benchmarking Tax Compliance Efficiency Among South African Retail Firms Using Stochastic Frontier Approach

Random selection of taxpayers for audit mostly nets tax compliant taxpayers. There is hence a need to adopt other methods that are efficient and and effective in performing their specific and general deterrence roles. This article uses profit efficiency benchmarking to analyze selected retail firms tax compliance risk in South Africa over the 2005–2006 period. It seeks to identify firms that should be audited because of their suspected tax compliance risk, using a stochastic frontier analysis. The profit efficiency estimates of 24 retail stores are used to rank them in terms of their performance. They are also tracked over time. Approximately, 50 percent of the firms performed better than the average profit efficiency of 0.39. The top 10 firms are significantly performing better. However, the bottom 50 percent of the retail firms performed poorly and could be targeted for tax audit.     

Black everyday life and the burden of death in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying

ABSTRACT

Zakes Mda’s novel, Ways of Dying, centers on physical violence and death in black communities during the transition from apartheid to democracy. Rather than look toward a post-apartheid future that is anticipated by so many, Mda depicts the reality of death as the product of the volatile politics of late apartheid, demonstrating through the lives of his characters the ways in which systemic violence persists. Set in the early 1990s, the pervasive experience of death and inescapable poverty is relentlessly depicted, unmasking any illusion of positive transformation. The novel debunks the widely celebrated idea or impression of the country’s transition as remarkable or peaceful; its focus on the tens of thousands killed at the tail-end of apartheid refuses this untruth. Mda invites a critical understanding of black literal death, its horror in the questions about mourning raised, and the structural conditions that confine black lives even as a grand narrative is being told outside this novel’s pages.