Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA)deputy commissioner of domestic taxes George Obel, early today said excisable goods would be added to the agency Tax Invoice Management System (eTIMS) to give the authority access to full trading information from business in real-time ,closing the gap used to pay less taxes.
Once we have successfully on-boarded the VAT-registered businesses on eTIMS, the next step will be rolling out the same to suppliers of excisable goods and services to bring more efficiency to the collection of excise duty,” said Mr Obel.
The sales of goods and services covered under the excise tax law, including beer, juice, mobile phone airtime, cigarettes and petroleum will be monitored in real time as the taxman moves to end tax leaks.
KRA has been piloting eTIMS with some 298 Valued Added Tax(VAT) registered taxpayers which have seen 908 invoices ,with plans for a full roll-out in early May this year.
KRA said that eTIMS will help businesses to reduce compliance costs primarily by cutting the cost of purchasing multiple tax invoicing hardware such as electronic tax registers. The real-time invoice transmission will improve the accuracy of invoice declaration and reconciliation between field returns and payments.
A thorny issue with the KRA have been the fake stamps that most of the business have been tempted to use, with President William Ruto speech in last year, particularly irked by the small number of excise stamps sold by KRA in proportion to the economy compared to its neighbors.
“Part of our revenue gets lost because we have more fake stamps than genuine stamps on our manufactured goods, how is that possible? We have to sort that out because we are losing revenue,” President Ruto said in October last year.
Digitization of tax invoicing is aimed at sealing revenue leaks that are costing the taxman billions of shillings annually.
BY SAMUEL WECHULI