Deputy Speaker, let me thank the hon members for their general support on this. I think hon Swart captured the essence of this Bill and the general approach of the South African revenue system and the tax system more broadly, and that is that we want equity and fairness in our system. He says that of course nobody likes to pay tax, but let us just remind ourselves that our own salaries get paid by the tax that is collected. The majority are compliant taxpayers - hon Swart is absolutely right. We need to increasingly do what we can to make it easier for them to comply.
Two hon members raised the question of section 45. Let me clarify this for the House. Section 45 is a technical provision which allows for mergers, acquisitions and reorganisation within companies without a tax liability. This is put in place in the Income Tax Act so that these activities can be conducted for commercial purposes - that was the original purpose. What we discovered more recently is that there is a tremendous industry out there which has been engaging in what we can call "creative tax planning", which is resulting in potentially billions of rands being lost to the South African fiscus.
There is no overreaction in what we are doing. When you see losses to the extent of a few billion rands, both the policy makers and the tax administration have a responsibility to intervene. We have a responsibility to say to those who are organising their thoughts around this kind of planning to stop it because we are living in difficult economic times. What they are asking this House and taxpayers in South Africa to do is to allow them their creative activities, which rob the fiscus of millions, if not billions of rands, and then tell us to go and borrow the money and pay interest on that money and increase the debt of this country so that they can carry on with their creative exercises. Surely the South African public will not and cannot allow that.
So, the suspension of section 45 will be for a limited period of time. What hon members should remember is that tax administrations and policy makers are generally 10 steps behind tax planners. In other words, it takes them a long time to discover what tax planners are really up to.
The second problem we are confronted with is that there is minimal disclosure by those who are involved in these schemes. We hope that you will persuade those who have been appealing to you in the committee to come forth and put all the information on the table. They must be completely transparent and engage in full disclosure of the schemes and not ask us and the tax administration to behave like eternal dentists, pulling one tooth at a time - provided you can discover where the tooth is, in this case. [Laughter.] The truth often gets mixed up in this process as well.