Ferdie Schneider is new Head of Tax for BDO South Africa

Ferdie Schneider is leaving KPMG in Johannesburg to join BDO as their National Head of Tax. He will be starting later in the summer.

Ferdie is a highly regarded VAT specialist and Economist. He was Chief Taxation Officer at SARS until 1994, when he moved to the Treasury Department as Senior Economist. In 1997 he joined Deloitte and was a partner when he left in 2003 to pursue personal interests. Ferdie resurfaced in 2005 at KPMG, where he has been a partner for the past 9 years.

His focus is on Value-Added Taxation (VAT), providing clients in all economic sectors with a variety of services such as tax technical opinions; facilitation of tax specific workshops; conducting tax reviews to ensure compliance with the law and optimisation of allowances. He has a keen interest in VAT on financial services and was part of a Ministerially appointed VAT on financial services committee in the 90’s which resulted in a widening of the South African VAT net.

In 2010 he formed a VAT Credit Retail focus group in conjunction with SARS which investigated the VAT implications in that specific sector, looking specifically at VAT apportionment and issues such as securitisation, direct attribution, etc. He is currently part of the Insurance VAT committee which is looking into the VAT issues in the insurance industry. He is also a member of SAICA’s VAT Committee. Ferdie has been very involved with the VAT legislative changes requiring foreign electronic service providers to register for SA VAT purposes where the law deems consumption to take place in SA.