KRA Director General John Njiraini
The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) has announced the exemption of all employees from the annual process of keying in their tax returns on the iTax portal.
According to their website,the authority reconfigured their systems to automatically capture the data from employers who submit Pay As You Earn (PAYE) tax.
Millions of time-constrained employees will no longer have to queue in long lines to beat the June 30 deadline set every year.
“KRA has enhanced iTax to have an auto-populated return of employment income. This has made it much easier, smoother and faster for employees whose source of income is only employment,” a statement by the agency reads.
Employees have only been left with the task of reviewing and confirming data which they previously had to key into the system.
The affected taxpayers are therefore urged to ensure that the entries reflect a true and correct position for the tax period and report any inconsistencies.
For a long time, Kenyans had been wondering why the government required people to confirm payment of taxes whereas the authority itself could do it from the back end.
The agency urged employers to issue P9 forms early enough to facilitate employees to verify information captured by KRA.
Unemployed Kenyans and business owners will, however, still be required to fill nill returns and taxes for their businesses respectively.
Taxpayers who will miss the deadline face a penalty of Ksh2,000 for individuals and Ksh10,000 or five per cent of the tax due for other entities under the Tax Procedure Act, 2015.