Tax Compliance Certificate from iTax

There are a couple of reasons you would want to get a Tax Compliance Certificate (TCC). The main one being – you are after a government tender and you have been asked for your TCC. Our main reason for getting it was purely because we wanted to be compliant, period.

If you fall under either of those reasons (or a different one all together), then you will appreciate this post. In the past the process of getting a TCC was a tiresome manual one that took 30 days! With iTax, you can now get your TCC with as few clicks of a button as possible!

Checklist

• Company PIN number – to log on to iTax
• A reason for your application
• Time: To apply – 2 minutes; For feedback and to follow up – 1 / 2 days
• Ensure that you have met all your tax obligations (see below)

A Tax Compliance Certificate shall be issued to taxpayers who are compliant with the tax obligations as per the tax laws.  These obligations are:-

1. Filing of tax returns for the registered tax obligations
2. Payment of the assessed taxes
3. Declaring the correct income.

Procedure

The Application on iTax

Log onto iTax using your PIN number. On the home screen, go to the “Certificates” tab and choose the “Apply for Tax Compliance Certificate (TCC)” option from the drop down menu.

Proceed to fill out the application form by giving a reason for your application – the PIN number and company name are automatically filled out – and when done, click the “Submit” button.

The system then acknowledges receipt of your application and gives you back an “Acknowledgement number” and an “Acknowledgement receipt” for download. You can download this receipt for future reference.

The Follow Up Afterwards

After “finishing” my application, I was very excited and thought how great things were now! From the olden days of physically visiting KRA, filling out a form manually and waiting 30 days for feedback on your application to just a few minutes on a machine!

My excitement was short-lived as a few days later, I received an email from KRA with the subject line: “Rejection of Application for Tax Compliance Certificate” (see email below).

Your first instinct is to panic! The thought of KRA catching up with you for not submitting tax returns, is scary. At least for me it is. Then you start thinking about what you could have done wrong as you know very well you HAVE submitted all the returns (unless you have not) and have paid!

After a while you relax knowing (1) this is KRA 😉 , (2) they have a new system, (3) they are transitioning. It then becomes obvious that the reason iTax would assume that you had not submitted your PAYE returns for the said years, was because you were not using iTax back then, chances are you were using ITMS!

Ideally since BOTH are online systems, then the records should have been pushed to iTax during the transition but I guess not. This is what I did next and it worked:

I sent an email to KRA (contact us for the specific emails we used) explaining that our application had been rejected and the reason was invalid as we had submitted and paid all our tax returns and that it was obvious iTax is assuming we hadn’t done these submissions as we were using ITMS.

Someone then actually got in touch with me and advised me to re-apply for the TCC and send them an email quoting the “Acknowledgement Number” of our new application.

I am assuming that they manually check that you are not lying about meeting your tax obligations and then they ‘stop’ iTax from sending you another rejection email and instead, enable it to send you an approval one as below:

This email will come with your Tax Compliance Certificate attached to it. Download it, print it, hang it on your wall and rejoice that eventually you still did not have to leave the comfort of your office to get your TCC 🙂 .

Note: A Tax Compliance Certificate is only valid for 12 months from the date of application and KRA reserves the right to withdraw it if evidence is found that you did not meet the application criteria.

The issuance of a Tax Compliance Certificate will not rule out an audit being carried out and any taxes found to be owing will be payable not withstanding the fact that a TCC has been issued.

Happy taxing and stay compliant!! 🙂

Images source. iStock