Sanral’s 2024 massive e-toll debt write-off is nothing short of creative accounting

The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA) notes that Sanral has changed its financial reporting practices from the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) to the Generally Recognised Accounting Practices (GRAP) in 2023/24 and, in so doing, has revised its Gauteng e-toll revenue up by more than ten-fold, from R589 million to a total of R6.507 billion for 2022/23. Its e-toll revenue for the 2021/22 financial year was similarly revised from R569 million to R5.374 billion. Then in its latest financials for 2023/24, Sanral has reflected its Gauteng e-toll revenue at R6.502 billion, when we know they couldn’t have collected more than R550 million.

Sanral defines “revenue” for tolls and e-tolls as “revenue is recognised when the customer passes through the toll”. Previously, Sanral only recognised revenue that it expected to collect. To now reflect revenue that wasn’t able to be collected as income, and then immediately writing this off in their expenses, is a complete change to prior accounting practices.

By reflecting Gauteng e-toll revenues in this manner, what Sanral has in effect done is depicted that it was expecting to make more revenue from the 186km GFIP network (R6.502 billion) than it achieved from the combined collection of over 1 600km of their entire Sanral-managed toll roads, which record revenue of R4.6 billion for 2023/24.

Sanral has similarly revised its e-toll debt, now recording almost all of that e-toll “revenue” as e-toll “debt” and “impaired debt”.

The e-toll debt at the end of 2023/24 is listed as R28.937 billion, with almost of all of that – R28.726 billion – listed as “impaired”. In Sanral’s Integrated Report (IR) for 2024, the figures for 2022/23 have been rewritten, showing R22.2 billion in toll debtors, most of this now impaired. Compare this to Sanral IR 2023, which shows R9.8 billion in toll debtors for 2022/23. Thus the e-toll debt more than trebled from what was recorded last year for 2022/23 to what is recorded now for 2023/24.

“This is creative accounting at its best, because Sanral has simply offset its inflated (uncollected) income, by reflecting almost the equal value thereof as ‘impaired’ expenses for the corresponding financial periods,” says Wayne Duvenage, OUTA CEO.

Also of interest are the following glaring figures and issues that that stand out in Sanral’s IR 2024:

• Treasury increased its grant allocations to Sanral for its non-toll road portfolio by over R6 billion (up by 25%) in 2024, from R18.126 billion in 2022/23 to R24.302 billion in 2023/24. But at the same time, Sanral has been unable to spend these grants, and Sanral’s IR 2024 reflects unspent non-toll road government grants totalling R42.162 billion.

• As we saw some 15 years ago under IFRS accounting principles when Sanral massively revalued its assets from R10 billion in 2008 to R239 billion by 2013, we have once again witnessed an unrealistic increase in Sanral’s asset valuations (almost all of which is based on its 24 384km of tarmac) by 29% in one year between 2023 and 2024. We cannot find a correspondingly high road development expenditure or road acquisitions from the provinces that could account for such a high asset value improvement. This is the kind of accounting that would normally send auditors scurrying to prevent another Steinhoff debacle, and more so because Sanral’s assets are non-disposable.

• We remain concerned that the Gauteng province was compelled to pay off 30% of Sanral’s Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP) debt, when government had already granted R28 billion directly to Sanral to off-set the initial R21 billion GFIP debt over the past 12 years. This excludes the R23.736 billion which Sanral received in 2022/23 through the Special Appropriation Act 2022, which Sanral IR 2024 notes was “to reduce the GFIP debt” and Minister of Finance Enoch Godongwana included in the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement 2022. OUTA would like to know how Sanral spent all this funding.

• An ongoing concern we have relates to Sanral’s continued gross overspending on Marketing and Communications, which increased to over R612 million in 2024. A few years ago, the average value of this line item of spending was some 75% less at R150 million.

• We are particularly concerned at Sanral’s restatement of its 2023 employee costs, from R492 million to R528 million. What accounting errors related to salaries could have possibly gone wrong and unaccounted for, after the close of the prior financial year?

• We also believe there is gross over-payment of funds to a handful of non-executive directors, who between five of them have earned a massive R10 million during the 2024 financial year, which was 18% higher than the R8.2 million paid to six of them in 2023.

• In addition, we believe the amount of “board meetings” attended by the current board is excessive and is indicative of overreach into operational matters and the appointment of executive managers, along with granting themselves the right to oversee capital expenditure project allocations.

• We also question the ever-increasing costs of the 112km N2 Wild Coast greenfields project, which has escalated in price from R6.4 billion in 2007 (including the two large span bridges), to around R10 billion by 2018, and is now touted to come in at around R23.5 billion.

“OUTA would like to remind the public not to be distracted by the Gauteng provincial government’s ‘foul-play’ cry against e-toll defaulters, for the province’s financial woes. Trying to blame the defiant motorists for the Gauteng provincial government’s financial challenges is a red herring. Motorists had every right to defy the corrupt e-toll scheme, and their use of these roads has been more than covered by their fuel levy contributions to National Treasury,” says Duvenage.

“OUTA believes a deep-dive independent forensic investigation into the financial affairs, procurement practices and general governance at Sanral would be very revealing of gross overspending and board meddling in a number of areas.”

More information

A soundclip with comment by OUTA CEO Wayne Duvenage is here.

See more on OUTA’s campaign against e-tolls here.