On the evening of 30 June, with hours left before the annual filing deadline, the Kenya Revenue Authority posted a notice saying the iTax portal had seen a surge in traffic and that some users might experience intermittent delays. Its technical teams were working around the clock, it said.
The deadline held. So did the penalties.
Two months later the pattern was repeated in miniature.
In mid-August, days before the VAT deadline, businesses reported system errors on filing and July invoices missing from the pre-populated return.
KRA described it as a network fluctuation and advised taxpayers to try a different browser or wait.
The next VAT deadline falls on 20 September, the first full cycle since VAT filing moved off the offline Excel template and onto the iTax portal itself.
Each time, this is treated as an information technology problem. It is a legal one.
Kenyan tax law now assumes a working platform, places the burden of assessment squarely on the taxpayer, and offers him almost no remedy when the platform is the thing that fails.
Start with section 28(4) of the Tax Procedures Act.
A return completed and submitted electronically is a self-assessment even where the form contains information pre-entered by the Commissioner. In plain terms, when KRA pre-fills your VAT return from eTIMS data and a supplier's invoice has not arrived, the declaration is still yours.
Understate as a result, and section 84 exposes you to a tax shortfall penalty. The data is KRA's. The liability is not.
Then look at section 25, the extension provision.
A taxpayer may apply in writing for more time, but the application must reach the Commissioner 15 days before a monthly deadline and 30 days before an annual one.
Where an extension is granted, the late submission penalty in section 83 does not apply. The mechanism exists. It is simply unavailable to the person whose difficulty began at nine o'clock on the deadline evening.
The law imagined a taxpayer who could foresee his own problem a month in advance. It did not imagine a queue at the portal.
KRA's own reliability commitment makes the gap concrete.
In May the authority said it was investing in cloud-enabled infrastructure designed to deliver up to 99.8 per cent uptime.
At that level the monthly downtime allowance is roughly an hour and a half. A single four-hour maintenance window, and there were four of those between late April and late May alone, spends close to three months of that allowance in one night.
Scheduled or not, that is the standard KRA has invited the public to measure it against. This is not a fringe complaint from the last-minute filer.
At an engagement with the Kenya Private Sector Alliance on 30 July, business raised intermittent iTax and eTIMS outages, ledger mismatches and delayed tax offsets as a direct cost of compliance.
Commissioner General Adan Mohamed acknowledged the problem and pointed to a redesigned system architecture, stronger interfaces and offline capability.
That is the right direction of travel. It is also a promise about next year, and the 20th of this month is a fortnight away.
The defence deserves a hearing. Most maintenance runs overnight. Congestion on 30 June is partly the work of taxpayers who wait until the final 48 hours. And the year's collection was a record: Sh2.844 trillion, up 10.6 per cent on the previous year.
An authority delivering that is not a broken one. But none of this touches the asymmetry. Whether the queue forms because the system is thin or because taxpayers are late, only one party controls the channel, and it is not the taxpayer.
KRA understood this in 2025, when it pushed the deadline to 1 July and waived penalties on returns filed by 5 July. In 2026 it ruled out any extension. Nothing in the law changed between those two decisions. Only the posture did.
Three measures would settle this, and two are within the Commissioner General's own gift.
First, publish iTax availability every month against the 99.8 per cent figure, the way any regulated utility reports its service levels.
A number the public can see is worth more than a notice regretting inconvenience. Second, issue a standing public notice that late submission penalties will not attach to returns filed within a defined window after a confirmed outage.
Section 37F already contemplates the Commissioner refraining from recovery where there is hardship or inequity, with the Cabinet Secretary's approval. The machinery exists.
Third, the National Treasury should amend section 25 so that the Commissioner may grant a general extension on his own motion after a failure, and not only on an application filed a month before anyone could have known there would be one.
From January, the Finance Act 2026 staggers filing, with individuals due by the end of the fourth month after their year of income and companies by the end of the sixth. That should thin the June crush.
It does nothing for the 20th of every month, or for the trader watching a validated return fail at eleven at night.
A tax system that files itself is a reasonable ambition. Until it arrives, the least the state owes the compliant taxpayer is that the door be open at the hour the law requires him to walk through it.
