My own boss, but I wish I paid more

The joys of self-employment are almost limitless.

First of all, if you're not doing the morning school run, you can work in your underwear till lunch time (unless you're a plumber or someone who makes house calls, in which case, I believe, you usually need to wear a long pant).

Second, self-employment is a wonderful antidote to illness. People who work for themselves, whose businesses and livelihoods and their ability to pay the school fees depend on their being able-bodied, hardly ever have time to be sick. Certainly not Monday to Friday; they occasionally get sick on weekends and on holiday.

Thirdly, if you work for yourself, you don't have to be a member of Cosatu, attend tedious congresses and go on strike once a year. Or give a toss whether Zwelinzima Vavi should be fired or not for having sex with the help.

These are the upsides to being self-employed. There are, of course, down sides. Like the fact that you actually have to work if you and your dependants are to eat. Then there is the business of not getting paid a cent in December while your children are demanding Ola Magnums on the beach.

Another very substantial negative about working for yourself is tax. When you earn a salary you don't mind paying income tax every month because you somehow feel that it's your employer who is handing over to the state your kilogram of flesh.

However, when you work for a CC that employs you (and that you are the sole member of) you are all too aware that the extortionate amounts of money going to the fiscus all the time were very much earned by your own sweat.

Every month my business accountant sends me an e-mail informing me that SARS will be taking X amount out of the corporate larder. It is usually a swingeing amount.

For the longest time I have had the vague suspicion that my accountant is secretly working for SARS on commission but my memories of standard-grade accountancy in matric are still so vividly painful that I cannot bring myself to actually figure out what is going on with my business's finances; that's what I pay her for.

Then, once a year, my personal accountant e-mails me to say that it's tax-reporting time and could I get an itb3 from Standard Bank attesting to the fact that they paid me all of R17.56 interest on my current account. Being South Africans, we leave this to absolutely the last moment.

So it was that, last Friday, I was trawling through my in box looking for RA certificates from Liberty Life and the like. As it happened, my return was filed some time on Friday afternoon - my tax affairs are not that exotic because, well, I'm not a plumber or a Croatian jewellery broker wanted by Interpol.

Much as I wince at the amounts of my hard-earned lucre that SARS purloins every month, I appreciate the fact that, last year, I paid for two new classrooms at a deeply rural Eastern Cape preparatory school and, the year before that I paid for half the drinks at a medium-sized police station's Christmas party. In other words, I am actually proud to be a taxpayer.

But I am less than pleased when I read about my tax money being used to build RDP houses that fall down the moment they're handed over because the building contractor's cousin lives next door to the best friend of the housing MEC's golf partner. Or that I'm paying teachers who can't be arsed to actually go to school.

To cut a long story short, a day-and-a-bit after my tax submission, Standard Bank SMSed me to tell me that SARS had paid R1259.65 into my account. It was an oasis of public-sector efficiency in a desert of dilatoriness.

Why can't the rest of our civil service be more like SARS?

This column was written by the author in a state of unbecoming undress.