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{
    "id": 955093,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/955093/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 277,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Nakuru Town East, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. David Gikaria",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2489,
        "legal_name": "David Gikaria",
        "slug": "david-gikaria"
    },
    "content": "Liaison Committee. When we were there, we talked to some people. In Australia, if you have a vehicle, you pay for the number plate of that vehicle on a quarterly basis. That is a type of tax that the Departmental Committee on Finance and National Planning needs to start thinking about. Anybody who owns a vehicle just pays for the number plate once upon registration. After that, you will never pay for it again. First, it will help this country to grow. Make it an annual payment, for example. Instead of it being a quarterly payment, make it an annual one. How many vehicles are there in this country? This is so that we can stop infringing on the small businesses and young upcoming business people. Instead of infringing on them and the little money that they make, if Gikaria wants four vehicles, he can make that payment. We tried that for vehicles which have been written off so that their number plates cannot be re-used elsewhere. That is one way. How I wish that the Departmental Committee on Finance and National Planning could do that on their foreign trips. The second point is about absorption. The amount of tax we collected in the last two years is even more than the KRA had intended to collect. But go back to the respective ministries to see the absorption rate. The absorption rate of ministries and state departments hardly goes beyond 60 per cent. Hon. Milemba said that there is no taxation without representation. It is high time we told the National Treasury that they need to wake up. Whatever money they raise should go towards what it was intended for. We should stop this aspect of supplementary budgets. It is very sad that in Nakuru County in the last financial year, they had six supplementary budgets, thus eroding the aspect of public participation. We had two supplementary budgets in the National Assembly. You can imagine a county having six supplementary budgets. It washes away what the people had already suggested. This country needs to encourage the youth, women and people with disabilities. The National Construction Authority (NCA) charges a lot of money. We encourage youth, women and people living with disability and yet, we put a lot of impediments in our different laws stopping the same people we intend to empower. If you register a company, you cannot be given a permit without NCA certificate. We need to look into that. The other bit is about tax evasion. So many people do not pay taxes. The taxman is deliberately doing this through his employees not collecting taxes, as and when they are due. It is not even about efficiency. It is about corrupt tax collectors. They come to me and tell me that I was supposed to pay Kshs1 million, but only ask me for Kshs300,000. I pay Kshs300,000 and avoid paying the rest. The new KRA Commissioner needs to start taking action. They need to sweep away any tax collector within KRA who does not do his or her job in the best possible way so that we increase our revenue and get new avenues of collecting money. Eventually, it ends up in other people’s pockets and for what purpose? We better stop harassing Kenyans. This aspect of taking Kenyan investors to court is wrong. They need to get a better way of negotiation. With the new regime in office, the KRA needs to start looking at the commissioners and employees who work there, so that they can fully collect what is due. We do not even need to go in the direction of increasing our tax regime. I do not want to talk much about the Banking Act and the removal of capping rates. This is something that we want to ask our Government. The Government needs to reconsider its appetite for borrowing from local banks. If the Government stops borrowing from banks, taxes will go as low as 14 per cent. This will give Kenyans an opportunity to borrow from the banks. Under demand and supply rule, taxes will go down on their own. We ask the Government to reduce its borrowing from our local banks so that we allow the SMEs to borrow. The banks collude and give us misguided information that is not supported by facts. At the end of every The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposes only. Acertified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}