The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) is set to buy Sh109.93 million intelligence gathering and forensic investigations systems, as it steps up its war on tax evasion.
An annual procurement plan for 2022/23 shows that KRA will spend Sh29.93million to procure an intelligence gathering system and Sh80million on a forensic investigations tools.
The taxman revealed in May this year that it is setting up an advanced forensic laboratory that will allow it to mine data, including hidden accounts and records, from taxpayers’ computers and mobile phones to detect tax and financial fraud.
KRA said the digital lab will target forensic acquisition, extraction, and discovery of electronic evidence.
“A lot of evidence gathered during the course of investigations is digital in nature such as e-mails, texts, video, audio, image files, and other transactional data on hard disks and other storage media,” the agency said in a disclosure on the new laboratory.
“The investigations of such crimes require sophisticated data acquisition, mining, analytics, and storage tools in addition to technical expertise to reconstruct the transactions and provide insights into complex crimes,” it added.
The move by the taxman’s newly formed intelligence management division comes amid a strong shift to online transactions and electronic record-keeping by businesses as opposed to the traditional paper-based accounting systems.
Many large corporations, including some multinationals and mobile phone operators, presently hand records of their transactions to KRA teams in soft copy.
The shift to online transactions has however proved problematic for tax audit and investigation teams amid growing tendencies by some firms to hide their actual financial transactions and accounts.
Aggressive tax collection and recovery measures by the KRA helped raise revenue collection by a fifth in the year to June 2022, the highest ever annual growth margin recorded by the agency.
It grew revenue by 21.7 percent or Sh148.9 billion to hit Sh2.03 trillion, eclipsing the previous high of 21 percent seen in the 2006/2007 fiscal year.
