SMEs Should Pay A Tax Rate of 25% – CS Adan

East African Community and Regional Development Cabinet Secretary who leads Kenya’s Doing Business reform program is engaging the National Treasury to explore a 25 percent tax rate for SME’s as part of the doing business reforms to address the paying tax indicator measured under the World Bank.

The CS was speaking during the Africa launch of the Africa Paying Taxes Report by the World Bank and PwC held at Capital Club this morning.

Kenya improved its rank on the paying taxes indicator from 125th to 91st this year and has already consolidated and made NSSF payments online as part of ongoing reforms agenda that will be reflected next year.

Overall, the use of technology continues to make payment easier globally, reducing the number of steps and the post-filing index measure. Kenya ranks 61st overall in the global doing business rankings, having risen 75 slots since 2014 when the country was ranked 136th.

“We have reduced the procedures on paying taxes to 14 from 25 recorded in this year’s report and we hope in addition to other ongoing efforts, we will make our ranking better going forward. We have other measures that we are working on with various counties that are not part of the World Bank report such as the elimination of numerous levies that make us uncompetitive and we hope these will make it easy to do business especially for the small and medium businesses,” said CS Mohamed.

 Kenya is aggressively pursuing a reduction in the timing taken to pay taxes through the I-tax system from the current 180 hours measured by the World Bank to less than 100 hours.