Players in the ride-hailing industry have faulted the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) for the challenges they face while filing invoices on the Electronic Tax Invoice Management System (ETIMS).

Most of the service providers process numerous invoices on a daily basis, hence becoming a challenge for them to make timely submissions to the taxman as required by law.

Celia Kuria, Bolt’s Africa Tax manager who spoke during the Finance Bill 2025/26 public participation, conducted by the National Assembly Finance and National Planning committee at a Nairobi hotel, urged the committee to allow for the inclusion of the “payments made to players in the ride-hailing and food delivery industry” among the exemptions that the bill seeks to exempt.

The Finance Bill seeks to exclude payments of emoluments, payments for imports, payments for interests, transactions for accounting for investment allowances, airline passenger ticketing and payments subject to withholding tax that is a final tax.

“There are several complexities in our industry that make it very difficult to act. They are millions, and this big volume would mean passing the invoices every year through e-Tims, which is creating a challenge for us,” she said.

They argued that they have been following up with KRA for the integration of their systems with the invoices, but the process has proven to be a long haul, as they have been engaging them since January of 2024 without any success.

“We note that the revenue authority is currently unable to provide a workable solution to capture the complexity in the industry, all this time after E-tims was implemented,” she revealed.

In line with this, the Committee chairman, Kimani Kuria, stated that they will be engaging with KRA to clarify and address the issue.

While still speaking on behalf of other industry players, Bolt also flagged the proposal that seeks to allow the taxman to access the trade secrets of businesses, stating that it presents a significant data privacy breach to their clients, which might draw some unprecedented risks.

Kuria explained that the erosion of privacy undermines public trust in regulatory bodies, potentially discouraging participation in digital ecosystems.

According to George Abasy, public policy manager at Bolt, the ride-hailing industry collects data to determine the location of the clients, where they are headed and the amount that one gets charged.

“We normally collect data even for purposes of assigning from an automation perspective, to know where you are located, where you are headed, the points where you are even domiciled and therefore if we end up releasing this data, one will feel like they are being exposed and therefore we are proposing that section 52 be deleted,” he stated.