KRA returns to manual tax filing after online hitch

The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) Tuesday allowed taxpayers who cannot access the automated iTax system to file manual returns after months of logjam.

KRA domestic tax department (medium and small) commissioner Alice Owuor said since the rollout of the iTax system on March 1, the taxman had been experiencing high traffic leading extensive downtime.

“We are not reverting to the manual system. We are just using this as a stop-gap measure for taxpayers who have been having problems with the system, which need to be resolved to allow efficient accessibility by users,” she said.

The electronic platform was set up to help net revenue from non-compliant taxpayers and those under declaring amounts.

Once logged onto the system a user can monitor their tax positions and manage their ledger pages in addition to filing returns.

Prior to the rollout, the system had been piloted among 100 taxpayers since October last year.

Ms Owuor noted the revenue collector had engaged all commercial banks to support direct banking for those unable to obtain payment registration numbers and electronic slips.

KRA has directed payments of Value Added Tax, Pay as You Earn, stamp duty, excise duty, Kenya Bureau of Standards, Sugar Development Levy and land rates be made manually to Central Bank or at commercial banks as was the case before the new system was launched.

People seeking to make payments for withholding tax, advance tax, corporation taxes individual taxes and instalment taxes can now make them through real-time gross settlement transfers (RTGS) to the Central Bank or through branches of National, Equity banks and KCB Group.

KRA has also extended the deadline for all taxpayers to register on the iTax system to the end of June in a bid to reduce the congestion. The regulator had issued a notice for all taxpayers to file returns online following the launch of the digitised system.

Ms Owuor said KRA was working on a way to schedule systems accessibility in order to resolve instances of downtime in future.

“A comprehensive work plan based on turnover and sector will be published in due course to guide all taxpayers as to when they will be expected to be on board,” she said.

Large and medium taxpayers already on the platform are expected to continue using the iTax system for their transactions.

The authority’s ICT commissioner, Ezekiel Saina, noted many of the users who tried to log onto the system at the peak of workload found it unavailable mainly due to the large number of users trying to beat the deadlines of filing returns.

“We anticipated the large number of users and we have adequate infrastructure to cope with the demand. What we need to do is to fine tune the system,” he said.

iTax was implemented by Indian giant Tata. The web-enabled system that seeks to make tax compliance a simple, quick and secure exercise is expected to bring down the cost of tax compliance in logistics, and help reduce interaction between staff and taxpayers, eliminating bribery claims.