Ferdie Schneider will join BDO South Africa as head of tax on July 1.
He was a partner of KPMG from March 2005 until now, specialising in VAT. Before that, he was a partner of Deloitte for more than six years. Between January 1990 and December 1996, he worked in government, first as chief taxation officer of the South African Revenue Service (SARS) and then as senior economist in the National Treasury of South Africa.
In the 1990s, Schneider was a member of a government committee on VAT in financial services, which resulted in a widening of the South African VAT net, and in 2010 was a founder, with SARS, of a VAT credit retail focus group, which investigated the VAT implications in that specific sector, looking specifically at VAT apportionment and issues such as securitisation and direct attribution.
He is a member of the insurance VAT committee which is looking into the VAT issues in the insurance industry. He has also worked on VAT legislative changes requiring foreign electronic service providers to register for SA VAT purposes where the law deems consumption to take place in SA.