Bain says guilty of ‘serious failure’ with Sars

Bain & Co, the Boston-based consultancy company that was hired to assist in restructuring South Africa’s tax agency in 2015, said it has become “painfully evident” that the firm’s involvement with the authority was a “serious failure.”

Not only was Bain’s hiring potentially irregular, but it overstated the need for change at the South African Revenue Service, allowed the former head of Sars Tom Moyane to influence its work and didn’t walk away when it became clear Moyane “had a different agenda,” Bain said in a statement on its South African website.

The consultancy showed failures of governance, an absence of public sector protocols and naivety about South African politics, Bain said in the statement, adding that it regrets that a former partner did not adequately co-operate with the Nugent Commission of Inquiry into Sars. “We have let South Africa and ourselves down.”

L.P