Counties

City Hall posts dismal revenue

City-hall

An aerial view of Nairobi City Hall. FILE PHOTO | NMG

Nairobi County government has yet again posted dismal own-source revenue performance even after tapping the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) to collect revenue on its behalf.

In the first half of the financial year ending June 30, 2021, City Hall collected only Sh3.9 billion missing the target by a whopping Sh2.5 billion.

The county government had set a target of Sh6.4 billion in own-source revenue collection for the six months between July and December, 2020 but managed to collect only 62 percent of that figure.

Nevertheless, the collection is a slight increase compared to a similar period in the financial year ended June 30, 2020 when the county realised Sh3.1 billion.

KRA was appointed as the principal revenue collector for the capital city by Nairobi County government in March last year in the process taking over City Hall’s internal revenue collection from March 16, 2020 and will be in charge of the same for the next two years.

This was after the implementation of the Deed of Transfer of functions between City Hall and the National Government.

“The Nairobi County government appoints KRA as the principal agent for overall revenue collection for all county revenue, for a period of 24 months, with effect from the March 16, 2020,” read the March 6, 2020 Gazette Notice.

Since taking over, the Authority has been overseeing all the 137 revenue streams for the county government with Nairobi residents using unstructured supplementary service data with a short code (USSD) *647# to pay for services.