Nairobi — The Kenyan government targets raising Sh3 trillion for the financial year ending 2024, amid tough economic challenges caused by the Ukraine-Russia conflict as well as drought and inflation.

President William Ruto is keen on raising revenue to help him fulfill last year's presidential election pledges.

However, it faces a daunting task in its push to collect taxes from the masses amid tax evasion and cheating.

In the 2021/2022 financial year ending June, for example, KRA raised Sh2 trillion.

Collecting Sh3 trillion, however, means that KRA's revenue target should rise by 50 percent, which is unrealistic.

N-Soft Senior President & Partner Prakash Sabunani reckons that raising the amount will be a difficult one for the state.

"So basically, the last fiscal exercise generated Sh2 trillion shillings for the Kenyan economy by the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA), which made for basically a new record in the tax collection," N-Soft Senior President & Partner Prakash Sabunani said.

"So expect this to go up by 50 percent within a year is a little optimistic to be honest, even if we are given the opportunity we as a company at N-Soft to bring in our solutions and to contribute to this race in scaling tax collections."

N-Soft help governments across the globe generate extra revenues without raising taxes.

"But on the other hand, the targeted collection estimate is way beyond the cohesive tax GDP indicator because that is what we have to look at," Sabunani said.

"This indicator has been dropping for a number of years in Kenya and it was at about 18 percent in 2016 and stands today at 14 percent all this despite the newfound economy rebound in the country because the economy is doing much better. But despite that, the tax GDP indicator is only at 14 percent." he added.