Willis Otieno slams KRA as prolonged eTIMS outage leaves businesses in limbo
By Mustafa Juma, July 25, 2026Lawyer and governance advocate Willis Evans Otieno has criticised the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) over the prolonged downtime of its Electronic Tax Invoice Management System (eTIMS).
The Safina deputy party leader argues that taxpayers should not bear the consequences of failures within the tax authority’s digital infrastructure.
In a statement shared on X on Saturday, July 25, 2026, Otieno said businesses had been left unable to generate electronic tax invoices long after KRA’s scheduled maintenance window had elapsed, increasing the risk of reconciliation errors and unnecessary compliance challenges.
“KRA’s eTIMS system has remained offline well beyond its scheduled maintenance, leaving businesses unable to generate electronic tax invoices and increasing the risk of transaction record mismatches,” he said.
Otieno argued that while taxpayers are expected to comply with strict filing deadlines, the tax authority must also ensure that the systems businesses rely on remain reliable and consistently available.
“Yet, when filing deadlines arrive, it is often taxpayers who bear the consequences through penalties and compliance burdens even when the failure lies with the system itself.”
He added that tax administration should be viewed as a shared responsibility between the government and taxpayers.
“Tax compliance is a shared responsibility. If businesses are expected to meet their obligations on time, tax administration systems must be equally reliable and accountable. A system outage should never become a taxpayer’s liability,” Otieno stated.
KRA had announced 20-hour maintenance
The remarks came after KRA had issued a public notice informing taxpayers that both the eTIMS and the Tax Invoice Management System (TIMS) would undergo scheduled maintenance from 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, July 22, until 2:00 p.m. on Thursday, July 23, a 20-hour maintenance window. The authority advised taxpayers to plan their activities accordingly and apologised for the inconvenience.
However, according to Otieno, the disruption appeared to extend beyond the announced maintenance period, leaving businesses unable to generate electronic invoices needed for VAT compliance and transaction recording.
eTIMS central to tax compliance
Introduced by KRA as part of its digital tax administration reforms, eTIMS enables businesses to generate, transmit and validate electronic tax invoices in real time.
The platform forms a key pillar of Kenya’s VAT administration. It has increasingly become mandatory for businesses across different sectors as KRA seeks to improve tax compliance, reduce invoice fraud and enhance revenue collection.
Over the past two years, KRA has progressively expanded eTIMS adoption, including rolling out simplified versions such as eTIMS Lite through mobile applications, USSD and WhatsApp to cater for small and medium-sized enterprises. The authority says hundreds of thousands of businesses have now been onboarded onto the system.
Businesses face operational challenges
Whenever the platform experiences downtime, affected businesses are often unable to issue compliant electronic tax invoices, potentially disrupting sales, accounting records and VAT reporting.
Tax practitioners have previously argued that prolonged outages increase the risk of invoice mismatches between businesses and KRA’s systems, creating additional work during reconciliation and tax return preparation.
Otieno’s comments echo broader concerns among sections of the business community that while digital tax systems have improved efficiency in many respects, their reliability has become just as critical as taxpayer compliance.