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We take a look at South Africa's crude oil imports for January 2019 and find a very concerning record among the data classified under crude oil. And as the tile suggests it has to do with so called crude oil that was imported into South Africa from Germany.
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Outlier in the data or Germany has very expensive crude oil for sale
The table below shows the crude oil records (as per SARS customs data for January 2019), and the odd transcation for crude oil from Germany has been bolded and coloured in Red.
So South Africa's cheapest crude oil per kilogram in January 2019 came from Ghana at R6.16 per kilogram of crude oil, and in total we imported R777 million worth of crude from Ghana during January 2019. South Africa imported 1 kilogram of crude oil from Germany at a astronomical cost of R15 812 a kilogram. This is clearly a classification error not picked up by SARS. Shocking that there are no checks and balances to flag outlying values such as this.It stands out well above the average price of the rest of the suppliers. And added to that Germany is not exactly a supplier of crude oil. One would have thought that SARS would be able to hard code anomolies like this, to ensure a big import into South Africa, such as crude oil is properly classified and that there are several editing and flagging mechanisms in place to ensure the transaction is flagged for two reasons. Firstly the fact that is is coded as crude oil coming from Germany, and secondly the fact that the average price per kilogram is totally different to the rest of the transactions.
The worry for South Africans should be the fact that if something like this which should easily have been identified by SARS slips through the cracks, what else is entering or leaving the country that SARS either doesn't know about, or is being miss-classified for the purpose of say avoiding specific import duties to be levied against importers?