President Ruto has proposed renaming the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) to Kenya Revenue Service (KRS) to make the tax agency more people-friendly and customer-centric.
Speaking when he officially opened the 13th Parliament on Thursday, the president expressed his administration’s commitment to ensuring that the tax system is responsive to the needs of the economy.
“We will also work with the Kenya Revenue Authority on a culture change to make it a people-friendly, customer-centric organization. I am of the view that we should rename it the Kenya Revenue Service in line with the proposed transformation,” said Ruto.
He pointed out that the tax system should be equitable, efficient, and customer-friendly, arguing that the current tax regime falls far short of this.
“The economic principles of equitable taxation require that the tax burden reflects the ability to pay. This is best achieved by a hierarchy that taxes wealth, consumption, income, and trade in that order of preference,” he added.
President Ruto indicated that there is a need for reforms as the taxman is currently over-taxing trade and under-taxing wealth.
“We will be proposing tax measures that begin to move us in the right direction,” he added.
Ruto further stated that the country needed to move away from borrowing to pay recurrent expenditure and ordered the National Treasury to cut Sh300 billion from the 2022/23 budget to relieve Kenya’s spending and borrowing pressures.
“We should never borrow to finance recurrent expenditure. It is not right, prudent or sustainable. It is simply wrong. We must bring ourselves and our country to sanity,” he said.
“To this end, I have instructed Treasury to work with Ministries to find at least Ksh.300 billion in this year’s budget so that we can remove it because the market cannot sustain the kind of borrowing we are doing as a government.”
So far WSR is doing the…
So far WSR is doing the right things. Who knows he might be another Emilio Kibaki. I pray.
Ruto’s head seems to be at…
Ruto’s head seems to be at the right place if only he can give politics of populism a wide birth.
Renaming a government entity…
Renaming a government entity doesn’t change anything about it!
Making it more efficient, effective, and simpler to use makes all the difference!
KRA fails to collect about 35% to 45% of revenue it should be collecting, according to audit reports!!
Most of this income is from well connected individuals associated with politicians like Ruto!
Change of name is like applying lipstick on a pig!
If he’s going to overhaul KRA and make it more efficient, then changing it’s name is secondary!
But he can fool a few suckers here; and that’s a win for him!
Call it whatever you wish…
Call it whatever you wish but the hose is tired of being heavily taxed to feed the political families. You can call it “My Damn Foot” but it will still be doing the job KRA is supposed to be do!