Salaried Kenyans can breathe a sigh of relief after the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) announced changes to the process of filing annual income tax returns.
KRA explained that salaried workers will now only be required to key in their National Identification (ID) numbers into the iTax system, which will then autopopulate their annual income tax data.
The system will automatically capture key details such as gross pay and statutory deductions for the specific fiscal year.
This marks a shift from previous years, when taxpayers had to manually input the information from their P9 forms into KRA's iTax system to complete their returns.
The shift is part of the ongoing integration of KRA's internal tax data systems with external government databases.
"Data is going to become, or has become, our greatest asset, so we want to see how we integrate it into various data systems internally so that we do not have siloed systems but integrated systems," said KRA Commissioner General Humphrey Wattang'a.
"For instance, we want to integrate with business registration systems and citizen registration systems so that we can easily prepopulate data," he added.
According to the KRA Commissioner General, the move is part of the broader strategy to simply tax compliance among individuals and businesses in the country.
"Our strategy and our digitisation journey are highly informed by what has been developed through our engagements with government agencies," Wattang'a noted.
Each year, salaried Kenyans are required to declare their income tax. An income tax return is a declaration of income earned by an individual within a specific year.
By law, every individual with a KRA Personal Identification Number (PIN) must file a return annually, whether or not they earned an income.
KRA's update comes less than two months after the Authority officially closed its iTax portal for Kenyans filing their 2024 fiscal year income tax returns.
