KRA postpones roll-out of iTax to March 2015

Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) Commissioner General John Njiraini at a past event. The taxman has now adopted a phased approach to the roll-out of the automated tax system after an attempt to deploy it nationwide in March failed due to technical hitches. FILEPHOTO | NATION MEDIA GROUP 

In Summary

• “We had to resort to progressive roll-out to handle the load issue that caught us by surprise in March,” Mrs Meyo said.
• Like iTax, ITMS was unable to handle heavy traffic and had less functionality, forcing the taxman to abandon it for what the “much more versatile system” — iTax.

By RAMENYA GIBENDI
More by this Author

The taxman has now adopted a phased approach to the roll-out of the automated tax system after an attempt to deploy it nationwide in March failed due to technical hitches.

Kenya Revenue Authority said all taxpayers were expected to be on board the computerised system by March next year, having split the implementation into regions.

“We have divided it into south, central, northern, Nairobi, Rift Valley and western regions,” iTax roll-out manager Elizabeth Meyo said in an interview.

The south region includes Mombasa, Malindi and Voi, while the Central region will cover Nyeri and Meru. Taxpayers in Garissa and Embu are in the northern region.

The programme will entail inviting taxpayers and training them on how to “interact with the system”, whose failure Mrs Meyo blamed for the hitch initial plan.

“Initially, taxpayers and our officers had no training on the system, which complicated matters, considering the heavy traffic then,” she said.

All the regions shall have support centres with trained staff to handle taxpayers concerns — both through email, walk-ins and call-ins.

Nairobi shall have centres in the city, Machakos and Thika and is expected to take a longer period to be covered due to its large size and number of taxpayers.

PROGRESSIVE ROLL-OUT

Rift Valley region includes the former Rift Valley Province, with two centres in Eldoret and Nakuru, while western region will have a support centre in Kisumu by March 2015.

“We had to resort to progressive roll-out to handle the load issue that caught us by surprise in March,” Mrs Meyo said.

Launched by President Kibaki on October 22, 2011, iTax was to replace the Integrated Tax Management System (ITMS) previously used by KRA, whose inefficiency the public had complained about.

Like iTax, ITMS was unable to handle heavy traffic and had less functionality, forcing the taxman to abandon it for what the “much more versatile system” — iTax.

iTax was rolled out on a pilot basis to large and medium taxpayers last October. Other taxpayers were supposed to get on board before March, for them to be able to file returns electronically.

The taxman had hoped to streamline collection of income tax, corporation tax, VAT, withholding tax, and other domestic levies, which have been prone to non-compliance because of the manual system of filling returns.

iTax is also expected to bring down the cost of compliance in logistics and reduce interaction between staff and taxpayers, eliminating bribery.

The Treasury has set a target of Sh1.18 trillion for the taxman this fiscal year to help fund a Budget of Sh1.7 trillion. Last year, KRA met its revised tax collection target of Sh963.7 billion.