The South African Revenue Service (SARS) is launching a separate unit to focus on taxpayers with wealth and complex financial arrangements.

The unit, which will be known as High Wealth Individual Taxpayer Segment (HWI) will initially be co-located with the Large Business & International Taxpayer Segment (LB&I).

The South African tax authority said at the launch that it had been “paying particular attention to taxpayers with undeclared offshore holdings to optimise compliance”.

As an early adopter of the international standard for the Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information, SARS has at ...