Both the South African Revenue Service (Sars) commissioner Tom Moyane and auditing firm KPMG must face action for the fiasco around claims of a “rogue unit” within the revenue service which led to several people losing their jobs, including former finance minister Pravin Gordhan, the South African Communist Party (SACP) said on Tuesday.

“It is common knowledge that Moyane relied on the KPMG ‘rogue unit’ report to engineer the dismissal of key Sars personnel dealing with sensitive matters related to State capture,” the SACP said in a statement following KPMG’s withdrawal of the report on which Moyane relied to lay criminal charges against Gordhan, and the commissioner’s subsequent attack on the auditing company for alleged “reputational damage” done to Sars as a result of its disavowal of the report.

“It is also evident that the ‘findings’ of the KPMG report were in fact predetermined by instructions from within Sars. KPMG has now, quite correctly, disavowed these ‘findings’, while Moyane, instead of getting to the bottom of who in Sars pushed KPMG in this direction, defends these concocted ‘findings’.”

While welcoming KPMG’s withdrawal of the report, the SACP believed the company’s conduct was deplorable and “far too little, and too late”.

“Not only has their role resulted in the destruction of the careers of honest and patriotic public servants, but it has deprived one of the best performing public institutions of professional capacity with all of the damaging impact that this will have on public resources,” the report said.

“KPMG must be held accountable with immediate effect for its role in manufacturing the ‘Sars rogue unit’ propaganda, and in converting the cost of the 2013 Waterkloof military airbase landing Gupta wedding to a business expense.”

The SACP was referring to the so-called #Guptaleaks, a trove of emails leaked to the media, in which KPMG is accused of helping the Indian family of passing off expenses for the wedding of a niece of the Gupta brothers as business expenses.

According to reports the multi-million rand wedding was paid for from state funds looted from a Free State dairy farm.