KRA to track beer, petrol, airtime sales in real-time 

The sale 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.

Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) deputy commissioner of domestic taxes George Obel said excisable goods would be added to the agency’s Tax Invoice Management System (eTIMS) to give the authority access to full trading information from businesses in real-time, closing the gap used to pay less taxes.

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.

“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.

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.

Further, he said, real-time invoice transmissions will improve the accuracy of invoice declarations and reconciliation between filed returns and payments.

Excise duty is the third largest tax head at Sh252 billion in the financial year 2021/22. This is expected to rise to Sh297 billion this financial year.

Fake stamps have been a thorny issue for KRA, with President William Ruto particularly irked by the small number of excise stamps sold by KRA in proportion to the economy compared to its neighbours.

“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.

Digitisation of tax invoicing is aimed at sealing revenue leakages that are costing the taxman billions of shillings annually.