Nairobi’s own-source revenue is set to improve substantially when the Kenya Revenue Authority rolls out a new revenue collection system.
The Nairobi Revenue System is contained in the City County Assembly Sessional Paper No 1 of 2020 tabled last week by the Nairobi Metropolitan Services.
The new platform, dubbed Nairobi County Revenue System (NRS), will be rolled out in phases to replace the Local Authority Integrated Financial Management System (Laifoms) that has been in existence since 2014.
Revenue collection in Nairobi was barely Sh8.3 billion against a target of Sh17.5 billion in the just-ended 2019-2020 financial year.
Covid-19 was partly to blame for the poor performance after business activities were reduced substantially from March when a curfew was declared to minimise the spread of the coronavirus that causes the disease.
KRA was officially appointed the principal county revenue collector on March 16 as part of the agreement in the Deed of Transfer of functions of the county to the National Government.
Also under the Deed of Transfer, several officers were seconded from the National Government and deployed to KRA to undertake revenue collection services.
The devolved unit had in 2014 contracted JamboPay to collect revenue on its behalf, but the contract was terminated in June last year.
Until the KRA moved in, revenue collection in the city was through the National Bank of Kenya.
JamboPay managed to automate 136 revenue streams including parking, rates, single business permits, fire inspection certificate, billboards advertisements and food handlers’ certificates.
The taxman is tasked with improving the county revenue collection. Since the advent of devolution, City Hall has hardly collected Sh10 billion annually.
As highlighted in the sessional paper, Nairobi County Revenue System will have integrated customer touchpoints which are USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data), web portal and a mobile application and and offer online services and simplified customer interfaces to cater for different demographics.
It will also have real-time integration with financial systems such as banks and mobile money operators. It will generate real-time financial reports.
Further, the new system will have an inbuilt payment system that enables a customer to make payments on the system through various payment methods including mobile money, cards and bank transfers.
“The above 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 Nairobi County System will be rolled out from July 2020 in a phased manner,” according to the policy paper.
NRS will have reduced data/information capture due to integration with third-party data sources and back end ERP solution to manage back-office revenue and administrative operations.
The system has also been integrated with Geo-spatial information systems and addressing systems for a robust payment gateway.
City Hall has been reliant on LAIFOMS for revenue reporting, RevenueSure & FleetFix and the eDevelopment permit system, a cloud-based system used by the urban planning sector for revenue collection.
Laifoms has been faulted as inefficient and challenges-ridden.
“In matters stability, City Hall is prone to many power outages that result in system downtimes. This has a direct impact on revenue collection and customer satisfaction,” the policy states.
The county revenue collection processes -such as those requiring residents to physically queue to make payments have also come under sharp criticism and described as generally long and tired.
They are prone to interference by both staff and customers, are manual, semi-manual, unpredictable and with limited payment options.
With Laifoms City Hall had the challenges of insecurity, instability as well as scalability and ownership, according to KRA.
The taxman was concerned that the fragmentation of systems made it difficult to have a single source of truth.
It was also noted that due to its outdated nature, Laifoms is also not able to withstand modern-day system attacks and breaches.