KRA to Hire 2,000 Kenyans in Hunt for Tax Cheats

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KRA to Hire 2,000 Kenyans in Hunt for Tax Cheats
KRA to Hire 2,000 Kenyans in Hunt for Tax Cheats

Africa-PressKenya. The Kenya Revenue Authority is set to hire more than 2,000 officers as it moves to scale up its operations against tax cheats in the country.

This is after the Parliament’s Finance and National Planning Committee directed the National Treasury to provide funds for the recruitment of the officers.

“The National Treasury should allocate additional funds under the Supplementary Estimates to employ an additional 2,000 staff,” the report tabled in Parliament read in part.

The officers will be deployed to investigate people’s sources of income and their expenditure against their tax declaration.

The additional KRA staff will also step up the analysis of companies’ financial operations, especially firms doing business with the national government and counties, to unearth tax cheats by matching their payments and income declared to the authority.

The agency had been seeking additional funds over the past years to enhance its capacity to collect revenue amid rising tax collection targets.

In June 2020, the tax collector got a boost when the National Assembly Finance Committee recommended an additional Ksh10 billion budget allocation in a review.

The additional budget was to assist in the identification and capture of wealthy tax cheats.

In 2019, KRA revealed that in a bid to meet its tax target and catch tax cheats, it intended to start seconding staff in factories producing excise tax-covered goods such as beer, wines and spirits, cigarettes and juices.

The closing of the loopholes comes in the wake of KRA missing revenue collection targets with Treasury revealing that it collected Ksh527 Billion between July and November 2020 which was a 16 percent drop compared to Ksh628 billion for the same period in 2019.

KRA has in January 2021 opened applications for senior positions including Deputy Commissioner- Tax Service Office, and various managerial positions in operations, data analysis, reporting, and in the prosecution department.

“We are seeking result-oriented, self-driven individuals with high integrity to fill the vacant positions,” the agency stated.

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