Thread by @mmnjug

You will find us here in our meetings planning, and doing a lot of things. We have teams of people here who are just looking for information, identifying these people who are earning income, and not paying taxes. - @CG_KRA to @BD_Africa

We call this tax base expansion. Some of them are physically on the ground, walking around, looking at those businesses, buildings, others are using databases, we normally have access to IFMIS. We want to see, if anybody is being paid by the govt, is he or she paying taxes?

We also work with other third parties like Kenya Power. We know you can build houses from loans, but that loan must be repaid from somewhere. That is why perhaps Kenyans are feeling we are very aggressive. But when I see a big car, I see taxes. - @CG_KRA

When people post those nice things, I want to know, have they paid taxes? It is for their own good. We also do not collect taxes that are in dispute, until that dispute is resolved. How can you hire us and expect us not to do our jobs properly? - @CG_KRA

By the end of October, @KRACare had surpassed its targets by Sh25B. Is this not a good place to be given our previous record of not meeting targets?

Ask yourself, what can the Sh25 billion do for you? Building 10,000 classrooms will cost us about Sh8 billion and they are going to be built by people in the local community. - @CG_KRA

Sometimes I am surprised how Kenyans sympathise with tax evaders a lot. They are very angry when people steal money from Kemsa and these other places. But when a tax evader is being arraigned, they say @KRACare is closing businesses, they shout KRA is too aggressive. - @CG_KRA

But is this not the same money? Money being stolen through tax evasion and through corruption is still theft of public money. Allow us and the courts to sort out this issue because we have checks and balances. Tax evaders are not some nice people.

There are businesses whose model is purely tax evasion. The law recognises these kinds of people and has provided ways of dealing with them. When you commit an offence, it stops being civil to criminal. So we have to investigate you.

If you are a manufacturer of alcohol, these are the most affected. We find you in your premises you are fixing fake stamps, the objective is obvious you want to evade taxes. So we must mark that factory as a scene of crime, because we have an offence to prove.

If a magistrate is able to visit the scene of crime as quickly as possible and note the evidence, then we can release that scene and you can continue producing. But before that is done, how will we be able to prove?

The reason we are very forceful on this is there is a legitimate business, which is producing alcohol, cigarettes and so on and it is paying taxes and employing Kenyans.

Then you come in and are not paying taxes, you compete with the legitimate ones because your products are cheaper, you move your products at the expense of the other companies paying taxes.

So if you do not close these illegitimate ones, you will close the legitimate ones. If we allow tax evaders to continue, we are effectively closing the other businesses that pay taxes.

If there is anyone being mistreated or being mishandled by KRA officers, we have a process. Get into our iWhistle. We have a full-fledged contact centre, call, report. Our emails are there. We are here as servants, to serve the people.

iWhistle - bit.ly/3c2SUX4

In terms of separation of our staff, we have a group still in court, but in terms of investigations that we have completed 80+ of our staff have gone home, a big number and it expresses the seriousness that we have in terms of ensuring that we have zero tolerance for corruption.

Even when we have not gotten you directly doing something wrong and we have intel that you are doing the wrong thing, we have a lifestyle audit. Each year we do about 15 to 20 targeted lifestyle audits and what we've done with those reports is that we share the findings with EACC

We also assess and collect taxes from KRA staff. If you cannot explain how you got your wealth, to us that is misconduct.

We do not deactivate PINs, you know they are the right of Kenyans because a PIN is used beyond tax. You may use it in land transactions, purchases of motor vehicles and so on. A PIN is a tax identification number and we do not deactivate or deregister. - @CG_KRA

What we do, is that you could register for an obligation which you do not have. Sometimes it is erroneous. Maybe you registered saying you will be paying PAYE or VAT yet you do not have these obligations.

So we have been cleaning up the system, removing these obligations since they may be used by criminals to claim input tax purporting to have sold to you.

@BD_Africa spoke to @CG_KRA Githii Mburu why they're watching your facebook posts.

bit.ly/3qxPuUw

.@BD_Africa interviewed @CG_KRA on why @KRACare is eyeing the nice things you post on Facebook and other social platforms bit.ly/31QqLR3