How to register a company on KRA’s iTax

Company registration on KRA’s iTaxFollowing the recentKRAdevelopments,KRAhave issued a notice informing the public about their new tax administration system. The system is meant to offer efficient and effective taxpayer service delivery and we have all been advised to file our returns through the online platform.As of the1st March 2014, KRA will not accept any manual tax returns and all taxpayers will be expected to useiTaxfor filling their returns.Kindly note that KRA will not accept nor issue receipts for manual returns of Domestic Tax Payments in any of its offices. All Domestic Tax Payments MUST be made through the Payment Gateway in any of the KRA agent banks listed on the KRA website.iTaxwill eventually replace the oldITMSand the TSW taxpayer software (used for VAT returns) but for a period, KRA seems to be running both alongside each other.We will cover the new iTax in detail as more and more features are enabled and as we learn more about how to use the system.In this blog post we will guide you through registering your company on iTax as this is required for any usage of the system.

STEP 1. Confirm your Tax obligations (old system).iTax will pull the information about which TAX obligations your company has from the old (ITMS) system, so the first thing to do is to verify that you have enabled the correct tax obligations.It is especially important to remember the withholding tax obligation, as this one was never really required before – but you need it to do withholding tax going forward!

STEP 2. Register on iTax (iPage)Click on the big iTax banner on KRA’s main website – it will take you directly to the login section of the new iTax.You need to first register your PIN on the iTax software to be able to access the system. The above login page allows you to do that.Click on the ‘Have PIN but not Registered Online?’ link.Select ‘Non Individual’ for the company and proceed to fill our your company PIN number and your Business Registration Certificate Number.The sections above allow you to update all you taxpayer information. Start from section A all through to section F confirming that all you details are correct, some might need to be updated but most will remain as they are. The iTax system more or less has picked all your information from the old ITMS system so there is little to make changes on.Typically, you will not be able to submit your information if there were any mandatory fields left unanswered.But once you are done and everything is up-to-date you will get this download link to access your new PIN certificate (Print it and hang it somewhere visible in your office).

STEP 3. First login / Change passwordAt this point you have received an email with the login and password that you can use to log into iTax. Two things worth noting here:
1.Everyone is assigned the same inital password, so you should change it as soon as possible (kind of a security risk if you ask us).
2.The first time login / change password page is broken – especially if you are using Linux or Mac OSX, more on this.When you first login you will be presented with a form that asks you to change your password, but upon clicking the submit button you are very likely to see the error message “Please read the KRA Website Secure Password Policy Guidelines and mark it into checkbox”Problem is you can not see/find the checkbox that you are supposed to check. How bad this problem is depends on your Browser and operating system.Essentially the checkbox is visually locatedUNDER the Vision 2030 logo, and there is no way you can click on it.
There are a few possible solutions to this problem.
*.If you are familiar with webdevelopment you can use Firebug or a similar tool to “remove” the Vision 2030 logo.
*.In your browser settings you might be able to remove the showing of images all together.
*.In your browser settings you might be able to reduce the text-size – thereby making the checkbox move up from behind the logo.The easiest solution however might be to use a Windows computer using Internet Explorer as a browser.
Using Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 11 we were able to see a tiny bit of the checkbox peeking up from under the Vision 2030 logo – just enough that you can actually click it.Once you are successful in changing your password, you can login back into the iTax software to see the different things that you can be able to do using the electronic system.Take special care to look at the “returns” menu point – from where youwill find sections for PAYE, VAT etc (depending on which tax obligations your company has enabled – see step 1).For your own sake we highly recommend that you download the example spreadsheets and take a look at what you need to fill out before you can upload file a return – It is quite significant the amount of information you need to fill out.