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{
    "id": 1427256,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1427256/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 334,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Osotsi",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13588,
        "legal_name": "Osotsi Godfrey Otieno",
        "slug": "osotsi-godfrey-otieno"
    },
    "content": "defunct local authorities to perform well in revenue collection than the current county governments. There is also the issue of counties not being able to meet their revenue targets. They do budgets and most of them exaggerate their own-source revenue targets, but they do not meet them. This is a serious problem and this Bill helps to a large extent on how to deal with this challenge of managing own-source revenue. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, this Bill is very timely and I know discussions have been going on amongst the stakeholders on how to deal with this problem. We have had the national policy that is meant to support the enhancement of counties own-source revenue. It proposed that we have an integrated county revenue management system so that we promote revenue collection, transparency, accountability and seal revenue leakages. This is a good discussion, but it has taken too long. This Bill is ahead of them by proposing that we have a legislation that will anchor their proposals into law. We have also had a multi-agency taskforce on the integrated county revenue management system so as to have standardized revenue collection systems in our counties. What happens in the counties is that we have diverse systems for revenue collections in different counties. Talking as an Information Technology (IT) expert, these systems are not type approved. We need to have a type of approval process so that we have an entity that analyses these systems and indicates that a certain system is suitable for revenue collection. Most of those systems do not meet the required standard. There is the issue of agency fee that has been raised by Sen. Cherarkey is true. Some of them have exorbitant agency fees. The question is, where does that money go to? If you ask someone to pay money and then you say 20 per cent of that money is agency fee. Why does that money go to? Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, these are the questions we ask and that is another avenue of stealing from our counties. We know some of these systems are timed not to operate at times, so that at a particular time when they think the revenue is high, the system goes down and they go back to the manual system. That is when the stealing takes place. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, I support this process of having an integrated county revenue management system. This will ensure we can have uniformity so that this House can audit that system. In fact, in some counties we have multiple revenue collection systems. So, this Bill by Sen. Kibwana helps us to standardize the systems that we have in our counties. This will ensure that there is transparency, efficiency and verifiability of these systems. We will also be able to deal with security issues like fraud and related issues. As we do this, counties must run these systems distinctively from the national Government. So, we need to relax the proposal that, “the counties shall, in consultation with the National Treasurer and Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) decide”, and maybe say, “maybe”. This is because, as the people who are supposed to help in implementation of Article 96, we also do not want to be seen making our counties subsidiary to the national Government. Sen. Kibwana, I propose that we have an improvement on that part. The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Director, Hansard and AudioServices, Senate."
}