When the State Controls Your Invoice, Who Protects Your Livelihood?

There is a form of repression that requires neither tear gas nor prison gates. It needs no midnight arrest, no padlock on a shopfront and no uniformed officer standing at a factory entrance. It begins with something far less dramatic: a business owner attempts to issue a tax invoice, and the system refuses to cooperate.

Imagine that the failure is not an ordinary technical fault. Imagine it is selective, prolonged and directed at someone who has criticised the government. A printing company that supplies schools cannot complete a client’s documentation. A wholesaler loses an order because the buyer needs a valid electronic invoice. A media house finds advertisers unwilling to risk a transaction they cannot properly account for. The employees still expect wages on Friday. The landlord still expects rent. The bank still expects its instalment.

Now ask a serious question: if a state-controlled compliance system is indispensable to commercial relationships, what protections prevent that dependency from becoming a means of political coercion?

That is the warning Kenya must debate about the electronic Tax Invoice Management System, better known as eTIMS. It is not an accusation that the Kenya Revenue Authority is currently using eTIMS to silence dissidents. No evidence is presented here of such a campaign. It is a warning about a foreseeable risk in the design and governance of essential digital public infrastructure—and about why democracies should close avenues for abuse before someone tries to exploit them.

To understand the stakes, begin with the law. Section 23A of the Tax Procedures Act, 2015, introduced by the Finance Act, 2023 and subsequently amended, provides the statutory basis for electronic tax invoicing. The provision requires persons carrying on business, subject to applicable exemptions and special arrangements, to issue electronic tax invoices through the system established by the Commissioner. The Tax Procedures (Electronic Tax Invoice) Regulations, 2024 supply operational rules for that framework.

This is not a voluntary smartphone application that an unhappy customer can simply delete. Electronic invoicing has become part of the country’s tax-compliance architecture. And its influence reaches beyond the seller. Under section 16(1)(c) of the Income Tax Act, business expenses generally cannot be deducted for income-tax purposes where the required invoices are not generated through the prescribed electronic system, subject to statutory exceptions. A purchaser therefore has a commercial reason to insist on compliant invoices.

That is where an administrative problem can become an economic crisis. A supplier denied a workable route to compliant invoicing may still be able to transfer goods or provide a service, but its customers may refuse to proceed, delay payment or reject the expenditure documentation. In a tight-margin economy, delayed payment is not a minor inconvenience. It can decide whether a business buys stock, meets payroll or closes its doors.

The stakes have grown. In a public notice issued in November 2025, KRA announced that from 1 January 2026 it would validate income and expenses in applicable income-tax returns against data from TIMS/eTIMS, withholding-tax records and customs imports, subject to the relevant exceptions. The purpose is understandable: better information can curb fictitious expenses, reduce evasion and make taxation fairer. The more decisive that information becomes in determining compliance, however, the more important it is that access to it be reliable, neutral and contestable.

Kenya should not confuse this argument with hostility to digital taxation. A well-run eTIMS can reduce paperwork, improve recordkeeping and support fair competition between honest businesses and tax cheats. Tax evasion deprives the public of resources for hospitals, classrooms and roads. Businesses must comply with tax law. But the legitimacy of the tax objective does not eliminate the need to restrain the means by which the state administers it.

Consider what an abusive administration could attempt. It might subject selected taxpayers to inexplicable account restrictions, delay corrections to erroneous records, abuse identity or PIN validation processes, or leave businesses trapped in unresolved compliance disputes. Such conduct would require access, complicity or failures of institutional oversight; it is not a power that the law simply hands to a President. The threat lies in what becomes possible when essential systems are administered without sufficiently strong, independently enforceable protections.

And the victims would not have to be wealthy politicians. Economic pressure travels through supply chains. Target a manufacturer and you hurt its transporters, cleaners and casual workers. Disrupt a newspaper and you threaten its journalists and printers. Cripple a small distributor and the consequences may reach a farmer paid after delivery, a child waiting for school fees and a family surviving on one monthly salary. A punishment aimed at one outspoken person can spread to dozens of people who expressed no political opinion at all.

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“In a modern economy, denying someone a usable invoice can become a way of denying them the market.”

The existing framework does recognise that systems can fail. Regulation 5 of the 2024 Electronic Tax Invoice Regulations requires a user who cannot use the system to notify the Commissioner in writing within 24 hours and record sales by another method specified by the Commissioner; once access returns, those sales are to be entered into the system. KRA also explains that some eTIMS solutions can issue invoices during internet downtime and transmit them later, while a USSD option does not require internet access.

Those safeguards matter. They mean it would be inaccurate to tell Kenyans that one temporary outage automatically makes every sale illegal, or that every eTIMS problem permanently destroys a business. But an ordinary outage is different from a targeted restriction that affects a taxpayer’s ability to generate invoices accepted by buyers, validate records or regain service through available alternatives. Parliament should examine precisely how present procedures would work in that harder case—and how quickly an affected business could obtain independent relief.

The Constitution offers a powerful starting point. Article 27 protects equality before the law and equal protection of the law. Article 33 safeguards freedom of expression within its constitutional limits. Article 38 protects citizens’ political choices. Article 40 protects property against arbitrary deprivation, subject to its terms. Most directly, Article 47 gives every person the right to administrative action that is lawful, reasonable, efficient and procedurally fair, including writ