A 12-year VAT fraud scheme has ended in a lengthy prison sentence.
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A R62 million fraud case spanning 12 years has cast fresh attention on the scale of South Africa's wider value-added tax compliance problem, as the taxman works to prevent billions of rand in impermissible refund claims.
The South African Revenue Service has welcomed the sentencing of André Claude Dickoumba-De-Diguela following his guilty plea to 127 counts of fraud and 66 counts of money laundering linked to fraudulent VAT refund claims.
Dickoumba-De-Diguela and Assistance Médicale Internationale CC, of which he was the sole member, entered into a guilty plea agreement over claims systematically submitted over 12 years.
The Specialised Commercial Crimes Court sitting in Palm Ridge sentenced him to 15 years for fraud, with five years suspended, and 10 years for money laundering.
"Fraudulent VAT refund claims are not simple administrative errors," SARS Commissioner Dr Johnstone Makhubu said. "They are carefully calibrated acts of criminality that defraud the country's revenue base, harm honest taxpayers, and deprive the government of the resources necessary to provide essential public services."
The case comes against the backdrop of a much broader challenge around VAT compliance and revenue leakage.
SARS said in February that its administrative efforts had prevented R50.1 billion in impermissible VAT refunds during the 2025/26 financial year to date, a 2.3% year-on-year increase.
Impermissible refunds are not necessarily fraudulent — the figure covers refunds SARS determined should not be paid and should not be equated with the value of criminal VAT fraud. However, the scale highlights the pressure on the VAT system, which is South Africa's second-largest contributor to tax revenue.
Its 2024/25 annual report states that it prevented impermissible refunds and revenue leakage of R147.9 billion across the board. In 2024/25, SARS completed 3,757 audit cases, resulting in assessments amounting to R46 billion.
"These audits focused on deliberate non-compliance, including false declarations, non-disclosure of income, and fraudulent refund claims," the report stated. "Significant strides were made in detecting and prosecuting tax-related crimes."
SARS said 290 cases were profiled and referred for criminal investigation, with outstanding returns, non-registration, and returns submitted without payments accounting for 56.20% of referrals. Organised refund fraud, particularly VAT-related fraud, was the second major contributor at 25.86%, with income-tax fraud and customs and excise violations also featuring.
Recent research using SARS audit and VAT return data has pointed to a persistent gap between domestic VAT that should be reported and the amount actually declared. An April 2026 SA-TIED and UNU-WIDER working paper estimated an average VAT reporting gap of 40.6% between 2016 and 2020 — a measure of non-compliance in VAT reporting that, again, does not represent fraud alone.
A University of Johannesburg LLM thesis in taxation noted that VAT fraud is committed through under-declaration of output tax, overstating input tax, failure of vendors to register, bogus traders, VAT claimed but not paid over, and claims for non-refundable input VAT.
SARS itself has previously acknowledged weaknesses in its visibility across the VAT supply chain, noting in a discussion paper on modernising VAT administration that VAT had the "least supply chain visibility" of its tax types from a self-assessment perspective.
"This lack of supply chain visibility exposes the fiscus to revenue leakages, which is time-consuming to detect, and requires frequent audits and verifications," the paper said.
VAT is based largely on self-assessment, with vendors calculating the tax they owe or refunds due to them using their own accounting records and supporting documentation.
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