The Kenya Revenue Authority headquaters at Times Tower.[Photo/the-star.co.ke]
Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) recorded a 13.8 percent growth in revenue collection during the 2016/17 financial year. This was Sh1.365 trillion compared to Sh1.210 trillion collected in 2015/16 financial year.
Commissioner for strategy, innovation and risk management, Mohamed Omar said that revenue growth has remained steady for the last one decade. He said a comparative analysis of the revenue generation for the past decade indicates that since 2011/12, the taxman has managed to double its revenue generation in a span of five years.
For instance, he added, in a statement, in 2016/17, growth improved by 12 percent which compares well with the five-year average growth trend of 14.3 percent.
Omar said while in 2016/2017, Kenya’s Tax-to-GDP (gross domestic product) ratio stood at 17.1 percent, the growth is still rated as the highest in non-oil economies in Africa and the highest within the East African Community region where the average stands at 14.8 percent. He attributed the consistent revenue growth to the tax and policy reforms KRA has instituted for the past decade to enhance compliance.
Apart from the reforms such as enhanced cargo scanning, rollout of the integrated customs management system (iCMS), the regional electronic cargo tracking system, Omar said the authority has established a fully functional scanner unit with a centralized command center.
He said the iCMS system comes with key features including cargo value benchmarking and auto-upload of cargo import data from shipping manifest to prevent import falsification.
The system can also auto-exchange information with iTax to counter non-compliant traders and a virtual electronic auction platform to make customs cargo auctions accessible to all. “The system will facilitate auto-population of declarations thus less room for errors,” Omar said.