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KRA to launch new revenue collection system for City Hall


Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) is set to roll out a new revenue collection system in Nairobi County before the end of this month.

The new system, Nairobi County Revenue System (NRS), will replace the use of Local Authority Integrated Financial Operations Management System (Laifoms) for revenue collection at the county with the aim of enhancing revenue collection in Nairobi.

REVENUE STREAMS

According to the taxman, the new revenue collection platform will be rolled out in phases with the aim of addressing revenue collection needs of Nairobi County as well as decade-long challenges identified.

“The system has been under development by an in-house development team at KRA with input from all stakeholders and the team has completed development for all key revenue streams. The system will be rolled out from July 2020 in a phased manner,” read in part a report by KRA.

City Hall currently relies on Laifoms as the main system for revenue reporting since it parted ways with JamboPay June last year.

The county government has also been using third party systems RevenueSure & FleetFix, in addition to e-Development permit system, a cloud based system used by the urban planning sector for revenue collection.

OUTDATED SYSTEM

But KRA pointed out that Laifoms is an outdated system hence would be impossible and expensive to upgrade.It can also not withstand modern day system attacks and breaches, and the use of third party systems also limits the county on the use and modification of the systems to maximise their use as well as exposing crucial data to the third parties.

“While improving or upgrading the existing systems was a viable option, it would be costly, inconveniencing and unrealistic to do so for revenue collection modules only,” stated the report.

KRA further stated that revenue collection processes at the county are manual or semi-manual, unpredictable, most not documented, long and tedious and are prone to interference by both staff and customers.

As a result, the new integrated revenue management system will incorporate features such as integrated customer touch points including USSD, mobile app and web portal offer online services and simplified customer interfaces to cater for different demographics.

REVENUE COLLECTION

It will also have an inbuilt payment system that enables a customer to make payments on the system through various payments methods including mobile money, cards and bank transfers.

The system will have real time integration with financial systems such as banks and mobile money and will generate real time financial reports and dashboards with 360 degrees customer views where all customer information is in one place.

The NRS revenue system has also been integrated with Geo spatial information systems and addressing systems and will encompass a robust payment gateway as well as reduced data/information capture due to integration with third party data sources.

Since the advent of devolution the county government has only been able to collect an average of Sh10 billion annually due to challenges associated with the current system.

Efforts to ensure optimum revenue collections in the recent past have also not yielded fruits with the county government not able to meet its revenue targets since the year 2014.