The Kenya Revenue Authority legitimately wants every business or commercial entity to use eTIMS or Electronic Tax Invoicing Management System. The electronic receipt, generated through an ETR or the eTIMS software, automatically advises the KRA of the amount of VAT collected.
This will help Kenya raise its tax share from 15 percent of GDP to closer to the global average of 20 percent. At the moment, Kenyans are grumbling about tax rises introduced by the Ruto government and they are right to do so until service delivery dramatically improves.
Still, many businesses operate informally outside the tax system. We should support efforts to make all Kenyan companies pay their fair share of tax.
But, only 187,000 out of 915,000 VAT taxpayers registered before the March 31 deadline.
To make matters worse, many of those have not included the PIN numbers of their customers in the system which prevents them from reclaiming input VAT. A particular offender is KPLC which has six million customers and, quite reasonably, says it can't input all the PIN numbers in time.
So KRA and government should extend the March 31 deadline for six months to facilitate a smooth implementation of the eTIMS system.
Quote of the day: "We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."
Martin Luther King
The American religious leader was assassinated on April 4, 1968
