How to avoid last-minute rush to beat deadline
By MUNGAI KIHANYA
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
07 August
2022
The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) has extended the deadline for traders
to comply with the new Tax Invoice Management System (TIMS) regulations
by two months to 30th September 2022. The extension was
necessitated by the fact that a large number of traders have not yet
acquired the new TIMS-compliant receipting machines and the gadgets are
out of stock.
Was the timeline too short? No! The regulations were gazetted and rolled
out two years ago in September 2020 and KRA has been regularly
communicating to taxpayers about the changes and the deadline.
We the licenced dealers of the receipting machines too slow in
importing? Not really. It would be unreasonable to expect them to stock
all the quantities for all the millions of traders to collect on the
final week before the deadline! Why then has it taken so long for
traders to comply?
This waiting till the last minute is quite common. We have seen it
before: during the Huduma Number registration, the new e-passports,
voter enrolment etc. This is human nature, so authorities must come up
with better ways of managing deadlines to conform with this behaviour.
One method that can work is already in place at a public boarding school
here in Nairobi. When the children are returning after a break, each
class is allocated a time-block withing which to arrive. They are
instructed to report back from 11am to 12pm (form 1s), 12pm to 1pm (form
2s), 2pm to 3pm (form 3s) and 3pm to 4pm (form 4s).
With the arrivals are spread out this way, the school is able to manage
the entrance process (checking fees payments, security, roll-call etc) a
relaxed manner. If the students were simply told that the arriving for
reporting is 4pm, nearly all of them would arrive between 3pm and 4pm
and the ensuing chaos becomes unmanageable!
Perhaps
KRA should have divided the affected traders into groups and then give
each group its own separate deadline. They could have been grouped by
taxpayer category (whether they are large, medium or ordinary) or by
region. That way, the migration to TIMS would have been easier to manage
for both KRA and the suppliers of the new machines.
But that’s now water under the bridge; the next big national deadline
will be for motorists to get their private cars inspected. I think the
authorities should order insurance companies to only not to re-new
policies of the affected motor vehicles upon presentation of a valid
inspection certificate. That will automatically deal last-minute rush.
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