eZISHA FEEDBACK & SENSITIZATION WEBINAR
TUESDAY 8TH MARCH 2022
2:00pm – 5:00pm
Target audience: Licenced practitioners in category C and T
Cost: Free
CPD: 2 CPD Units
Globally, accountants—with their technical expertise and professional and ethical training—play a critical role in assisting client and employer taxpayers regarding tax obligations. Accountants play this role through helping employers and clients understand their fiscal and regulatory obligations in relation to taxation and advise them on how to comply. Moreover, ensuring that their employers and clients understand the options available to them and assist them to be as tax competitive as possible (thus creating economic wealth and employment).
Section 24 of the Tax Procedures Act No 29 of 2015 stipulates the requirement by all taxpayers to file returns. Currently, owing to the inaccessibility of tax professionals to the general public as well as the low penetration rate on tax compliance, some taxpayers while striving to ensure tax compliance have resolved to seek the services of non-professionals in filing their returns, which exposes them to the risk of misappropriation and incorrect returns while further subjecting them to more scrutiny and penalties.
Inaccessibility of tax professionals to the general public could be one of the reasons for subdued tax compliance status in the country. According to Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA), by 2018, there were 3.94 million active taxpayers rising from 1.6million in 2014/15. KRA achieve a weighted compliance rate of 65%, this is an average of registration, filing and payment rates of 60%, 55.5% and 79.9% respectively as the per KRA’s 7th Corporate plan.
Equally, KRA’s Annual Performance Reports FY 2018/19 and FY 2019/20 point a clearer picture on the aspect of tax compliance. As at December 2019, there were 9, 793, 492 registered taxpayers. Of these, only 4.4million taxpayers filed their tax returns in the FY 2019/20, this was an improvement from 3.8 million taxpayer returns in Financial Year 2018/2019. This implies that out of 9.7 million registered taxpayers, more than half, that is, 5.3 million taxpayers did not file their returns in 2019/20. The 8th KRA Corporate Plan issued in 2021 projected the number of active Tax Payers to grow from 6.1million to 8.2million by end of the Financial Year 2023/2024.
To this end, the Institute intends to support the Government and taxpayers comply with the various tax obligations through “eZisha” platform. E-zisha aims at fulfilling the following main objectives:
- Providing a platform for taxpayers interested in accessing services of accountants for purposes of complying with their tax obligations.
- Linking interested taxpayers with accredited CPA tax firms and tax practitioners for support in compliance.
In this case, taxpayers will be able to access over 1000 CPA firms to support tax compliance, audit and related matters.
This platform and eligibility for registration and receipt of services shall be open to the public, specifically targeting taxpayers in Kenya and abroad. The services shall be coordinated by ICPAK and provided by the tax practitioners as licensed by ICPAK in the new multiple license category T and the composite license category C.
It is in this regard that the Institute invites you to a virtual sensitization forum on Tuesday, 8th March, 2022 from 2:00pm to explore the value proposition and benefits of the eZisha tax returns filling platform.
Target audience: Licenced practitioners in category C and T
Cost: Free
CPD: 2 CPD Units