President Ruto Wants KRA Renamed to Kenya Revenue Service

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.”