Last month, I was in Johannesburg and Cape Town for client visits, usergroup visits and an AIR camp. In all honesty, I didn’t really associate South Africa with “high-tech” but boy did they prove me wrong! On some fronts they are well ahead of other countries. One example is filing taxes. While filing (and especially paying) taxes is not that much fun, the South African Revenue Service (SARS) does everything they can to make it as easy as possible (something other countries can learn from).

However, South Africa has one big high-tech problem. They seriously lack high speed Internet. Believe me! I had one occasion where I was at a conference center that only had a 256KBps ISDN-line for the entire complex (including the hotel and administration). In fact, most people with IT-related jobs, use 3G modems because this is the fastest and cheapest internet they can get. Obviously, this is something the revenue service has to keep in mind when providing new services. This is the main reason why they chose AIR as a platform to build their new eFiling application on.

The application is unbelievably easy to use. You launch the app, fill in your social security number and password and you’re ready to go. This is one of two occasions where the app needs to connect to the web. When you first log in, the app gets all your details about earnings etc from the SARS servers. The only thing left to do is add your deductible expenses. After doing that, the app immediately tells you how much taxes you owe the government. When you hit “send”, all the details are sent back to the SARS servers. So instead of having to download the entire application, taxpayers just use the AIR application (which they get on a CD-rom) and only download and upload the details. I know this sounds pretty simple but I thought it was very impressive and I really wouldn’t mind using the same application for my taxes.

My trip to South Africa was a real eye-opener on many points and I’d love to go back soon to further explore the innovations happening in the region. Even though I was only there for 8 days, it felt like South Africa is really booming.