South Africa’s SARS to Issue Biometric Digital Identity to All Taxpayers Under Modernisation 3.0

The South African Revenue Service has unveiled Modernisation 3.0, a digital transformation programme that will assign every taxpayer a unique digital identity secured by biometric and two-factor authentication and consolidate all their SARS accounts into a single authenticated view.

The announcement came as SARS confirmed it had collected R2.01 trillion in net revenue for the 2025/2026 financial year, the first time the agency has crossed the R2 trillion mark. Under the programme, taxpayers and their authorised representatives will be able to update their status, view all accounts and make payments without needing to contact the agency directly.

Modernisation 3.0 also introduces an intelligent case management system that will apply data science and what SARS described as “agentic AI” to automate routine compliance work and identify risk. The programme targets the VAT system for automatic assessment of returns and includes plans for a “no-stop border-post concept” developed in coordination with other government agencies to streamline the flow of goods across South Africa’s borders.

An instant payment system, to be developed with the South African Reserve Bank, is designed to reduce cash in circulation and aligns with the central bank’s broader push toward digitising the payments ecosystem. The programme builds on SARS’s existing auto-assessment capability, which saw more than six million taxpayers receive automatic assessments in the most recent filing season.

SARS Commissioner Edward Kieswetter described the direction as a vision in which “tax just happens,” citing the agency’s investment in data science and AI-driven compliance tools. The programme follows South Africa’s Smart ID expansion into bank branches, which is broadening access to biometric national identity credentials across the country.

The agency said it had prevented an estimated R75 billion in revenue leakage during the year through syndicate-crime investigations and data-science-driven verification processes. A preliminary R316.4 billion was secured from compliance activities in 2025/2026, comprising R164.6 billion in cash collections and R151.8 billion in leakage protection.

The programme also builds on South Africa’s expanding Smart ID enrollment infrastructure, which has extended biometric identity credential issuance through bank branches in recent years. South Africa’s Revenue Service becomes one of the first major tax administrations to formally commit to issuing biometric digital identities as the primary authentication mechanism for all taxpayer interactions.

Sources: South African Revenue Service, TechCentral

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By Ali Nassar-Smith