SARS’s digital border bureaucracy – progress or pointless compliance?

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Temba A Nolutshungu | President | Free Market Foundation | mail me |

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“If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” – Abraham Maslow

The South African administrative state has acquired yet another hammer – digital traveller technology.

Government departments appear now to assume that because something can be digitised, it should be digitised. Worse still, because information can be collected, it ought to be collected. SARS’s compulsory new online “Traveller Declaration” system exemplifies this increasingly pervasive mindset.

Presented as a bold modernisation of customs administration, the initiative is neither modern nor innovative. It is the digital resurrection of an administrative practice wisely abandoned over twenty-five years ago because it imposed substantial costs and burdens while delivering negligible benefit…

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