KRA and Safaricom in Talks to Use M-Pesa for Small Business Tax Invoicing
Kenya Revenue Authority and Safaricom are exploring a system that would use M-Pesa to issue tax invoices for small businesses, which would embed tax compliance directly into Africa's largest mobile money platform. The discussions, if concluded, could significantly extend KRA's reach into Kenya's informal economy.
M-Pesa Tax: the informal economy just got a paper trail
Three million M-Pesa merchants already run their daily sales through a till number or paybill. KRA's proposal would turn every one of those payment records into an automatic tax invoice — generated by Safaricom, transmitted to the revenue authority at end of day, without the merchant lifting a finger.
That's the quiet revolution here. Kenya's informal economy has always been hard to tax not because traders were hiding, but because producing formal invoices was genuinely beyond most of them. Reverse invoicing — where the platform generates the paperwork on the supplier's behalf — solves that without asking anyone to change how they already pay or get paid.
For 3.13 million businesses that already live inside M-Pesa, compliance just becomes a feature of the infrastructure they're already using. That's a fundamentally different proposition than asking a market trader to learn eTIMS.
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- KRA and Safaricom explore using M-Pesa to issue tax invoices for small businesses · techtrendske.co.ke · T2