The South African Revenue Service (Sars) has issued a request for information (RFI) for an advanced AI system with “digital twinning” capabilities to assist with automated decision making as its seeks boost tax collection.

The move is part of the tax agency’s wider plan to modernise its IT platforms. Sars has requested companies with the skills and experience in advanced AI systems to showcase their capabilities and help it “understand the capabilities and offerings of potential partners”.

It said it wants to build an “intelligent tax and customs administration platform and broader tax ecosystem that depends on and embeds advanced data science and artificial intelligence, while augmenting the work of our employees with insights from data”, said Sars in the RFI. “We are therefore building on our existing work to harness the transformative power of people, data science and AI in tax administration.”

Sars said it aims to incorporate AI-driven automated decision making across the organisation. However, its pilot use case – which it will use to evaluate AI solutions – involves a process where taxpayers submit reasons and supporting documents seeking outcomes favourable to them.

Sars said it wants to deploy systems that are capable of:

Mimicking human decision logic using AI and machine-learning models;
Integrating structured and unstructured data, rules, natural language processing and human logic “twinning” to enable real-time decision making at scale;
Integrating seamlessly with existing Sars systems;
Operating securely within the regulatory constraints of the public sector;
Supporting explainability and auditability while keeping human agents in the loop for oversight; and
Enabling future scalability to other Sars business processes beyond the initial use case.

Digitisation has been a key driver of improved performance at Sars in recent years. In the 2025 national budget, the tax authority was allocated R7.5-billion in the medium term, with R3-billion of this money set aside for technology upgrades. These upgrades include employing additional IT expertise and adding new digital systems.

‘Cognitive decision automation’

Sars wants to increase the tax take by between R20-billion and R50-billion in the current tax year and has identified advanced technologies as key to achieving this. It has said that advanced data analytics and AI tools will also be used more extensively to detect compliance risk and improve overall compliance.

Read: ‘Advanced’ data analytics, AI to help Sars reach ‘tougher’ collections target

“This is a market engagement exercise and does not constitute a formal procurement process. It will inform Sars’s strategy, solution design and potential future procurement of an enterprise grade AI-driven digital twinning platform for cognitive decision automation,” said Sars in the RFI.

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