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{
    "id": 699539,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/699539/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 276,
    "type": "other",
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    "content": "will never meet the demands of our counties. That is why county governments must find ways and means of generating revenue. One of the ways is ensuring that we seal the existing loopholes in terms of the local revenue generation. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, most of the counties – it is saddening – are generating less revenue than what used to be collected by the defunct local authorities yet through every year, the Finance Bills in our county assemblies always expand the taxation bracket. Now, you find counties collecting taxes and levies on things that local authorities previously did not collect taxes on. If you were to work with simple mathematics, you would expect that county governments would now be collecting much more; double or triple of what local authorities were collecting previously. However, the true position is that they are collecting less yet they expanded the taxation base. This is precipitated by the fact that there are serious loopholes in the collection of revenue. Use of ICT would provide an excellent opportunity to seal those loopholes. You go to a parking in the counties, you pay for your parking fee and you are given a receipt. In one of the incidences in my county, Boda boda operators are charged on daily basis by the county government and they are given receipts. We discovered that some of unscrupulous businessmen working in collusion with county officials had developed fake receipts which they issued to Boda boda operators which means you are losing a lot of revenue to some of these unscrupulous businessmen working in cahoots with our county officials. If you want to seal this loophole, you must engage ICT solutions. This will ensure you are able to net all the resources. It does not make sense that a county will charge Boda boda operators, small business persons working in kiosks without providing the necessary facilities just because you are unable to collect all these resources into the county coffers and provide the facilities that these business persons need from the county. Therefore, I encourage all the county governments, particularly my county; that they need to focus on ICT solutions to seal the existing loopholes in revenue collection. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, the other important aspect of ICT is that it can be a good solution to provide job opportunities for our young people. We have the incubation centres that exist in Nairobi. I would expect that county governments, whenever they work on their budgets as a matter of priority, allocate adequate resources to the departments of ICT to come up with incubation centres in our counties because it is one area that you can absorb a lot of our young people who are already interested in ICT. If you go to every village, you meet a young person already operating a smart phone but we need to find a proper way of ensuring that some of these interests in ICT products are escalated to the point of generating revenue through them. I would be interested to see a county government supporting young people through the Youth Enterprise Development Programmes to set up ICT hubs in our counties. This will engage the young people in meaningful development programmes and issues that are of particular interest to them. That is an important aspect that I think county governments must deal with. Of course, one of the impediments to entrenchment of ICT in our counties is lack of proper budgetary allocations. If there is one particular challenge other than corruption that bedevils devolution is misplaced priorities. When you go to a county, as a matter of fact, health is priority and so is infrastructure. The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes only. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate"
}