A section of taxpayers on Monday struggled to log into the Kenya Revenue Authority's (KRA) online tax filing platform, iTax, as thousands rushed to submit their mandatory annual income tax returns ahead of the June 30 deadline to avoid penalties.
Some taxpayers were greeted by broken links and error messages when attempting to access the portal, leaving many frustrated and fearing they would miss the statutory deadline.
Under Kenyan law, taxpayers who fail to file their annual returns by June 30 risk late-filing penalties and, in some cases, default tax assessments by KRA.
The congestion is not new. Since iTax was rolled out in 2013, the platform has routinely experienced heavy traffic in the final days of the filing season as millions of taxpayers wait until the last minute to comply.
Experts insisted that compliant taxpayers should not be penalised for an error that was not theirs.
Every year, KRA mounts public awareness campaigns urging taxpayers to file early and avoid the predictable last-minute rush, but many still wait until the closing hours.
"This is not just a sensitisation issue. The June 30 deadline is predictable every year, and KRA needs a system that is scalable enough to handle peak traffic," said Steve Okoth, Director and Regional Head of Tax at BDO East Africa, noting that the problem started over the weekend and persisted through Monday.
"The lasting solution is to upgrade capacity, stress-test the platform before the filing season, provide real-time public updates during outages, and extend filing deadlines where system failures materially affect taxpayers' ability to comply," added Mr Okoth.
Social media platforms were awash with complaints from frustrated taxpayers. Some appealed to KRA to extend the filing deadline, arguing that the outage was beyond their control.
By Monday evening, however, experiences remained mixed. While some taxpayers reported they had eventually managed to submit their returns after repeated attempts, others said they remained locked out of the system. Mr Okoth noted that some users had better success accessing iTax through Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox browsers than Google Chrome.
Kenya requires every holder of a KRA PIN with an income tax obligation—including those with no taxable income—to file an annual return.
The country has millions of registered individual taxpayers, making the June filing deadline one of KRA's busiest compliance periods each year.
Previous attempts to abolish mandatory annual returns for certain taxpayers have been shelved after the tax authority argued that the requirement remains a critical compliance and data collection tool.
Beyond annual income tax returns, taxpayers must follow different filing calendars depending on the tax head. PAYE returns are filed monthly by employers, VAT returns are due every month, while excise duty, turnover tax and several other obligations also follow monthly filing cycles.
Annual income tax returns remain the largest filing exercise because they cover every taxpayer with an income tax obligation.
By the close of business on Monday, KRA had not responded to Business Daily's questions on the outage.
However, an official at the authority, who was not authorised to speak on the matter, attributed the disruption to "too many users at the same time," saying the surge in simultaneous logins had likely strained the system.
