The Kenya Revenue Authority on Monday appointed George Obell as Commissioner for the Micro and Small Taxpayers Department (MST) following the conclusion of a competitive recruitment process.
Mr Obell, a seasoned tax administrator with 28 years’ experience, becomes the second substantive commissioner to be appointed under the ongoing restructuring at Times Tower in a bid to “strengthen institutional capacity, enhance service delivery and drive organisational excellence”.
The appointment tightens the ongoing major organisational revamp at the KRA, and follows last September’s hiring of Nancy Ng’etich as Commissioner for Shared Services.
Recruitment for three more commissioners and 12 deputy commissioners is ongoing, according to board chairman Ndiritu Muriithi.
The pending commissioner jobs are in three departments of Large & Medium Taxpayers (held in acting capacity by Doreen Mbingi), Business Strategy, Technology and Enterprise Modernisation under Alex Mwangi, also on an interim basis, and Investigations and Enforcement, led on temporary terms by Levi Mukhweso.
KRA commissioners work under a five-year contract, renewable once.
Mr Obell has been serving as interim commissioner for Micro and Small Taxpayers Department since its creation in March, following the split of the Domestic Taxes Department into two departments— the other being the Large and Medium Taxpayers unit.
The creation of the MST department is aimed at lifting collections from the notoriously opaque segment of the economy, which has, for decades, left the taxman frustrated.
The KRA continues to struggle in tracking the activities of micro businesses such as salons, bars and corner shops because they largely operate in informal settings with little or no regulations.
The traders also largely rely on cash transactions, which hinders auditing and monitoring their financial dealings, a situation further compounded by a lack of record-keeping practices.
The KRA has settled on Mr Obell to lead the team tasked to pursue the elusive small traders, partly owing to his credentials tailored to high-risk opacity.
He previously served as Deputy Commissioner for the Medium Taxpayers Office (MTO) and before that as Deputy Commissioner for East and South of Nairobi — positions that were at the centre of the first wave of digitalisation work at the KRA.
He was at the centre of KRA’s successful implementation of e-invoicing, adoption of data-analytics for risk‐scoring and the shift to data-led compliance interventions.
Mr Obell currently chairs the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF) VAT Technical Committee.
“His expertise spans various areas of tax policy and administration, including digital taxation, transfer pricing, Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS), tax audits and Exchange of Information (EOI),” KRA Commissioner-General Humpreh Wattanga wrote in a press statement.
Nearly a decade ago, as part of a small specialist team that helped create the International Tax Office, Mr Obell was central in designing and executing the agency’s multinational tax interventions, particularly on transfer pricing and profit shifting.
In 2017, UN Secretary-General António Guterres appointed him to the 25-member UN Committee of Experts on International Cooperation in Tax Matters, making him the first Kenyan in history to serve in that role. He served four years through 2020.
