This archive report was first published on 28 November 2019.
On November 26, 2019, Parliament's Budget and Appropriations Committee directed the Treasury to allocate an additional Sh2 billion to the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) to enable the taxman hire more employees.
The KRA will use the funds to recruit 1,000 intelligence and enforcement officers whose primary task will be to identify and arrest wealthy high-networth individuals who engage in tax evasion.
According to the National Assembly committee, the additional staff will be tasked with investigating the sources of income and expenditure of rich individuals against their tax remittances, as well as working on intelligence reports to seek recovery of unpaid taxes.
The KRA's total workforce stands at 8,000, and with the additional 1,000 staff, the taxman is expected to collect at least a fifth of the unremitted billions by June 2020.
The move is aimed at cutting the revenue shortfalls, with the government's revenue collection performance for the 2019-20 financial year expected to fall short by about Sh120 billion to stand at Sh1.7 trillion.
