Ten years ago, KRA had a massive issue with cars which had evaded duty. One of my friends was test driving a Prado in the CBD when KRA officials pounced on him. They had him drive the car to Times Towers where it was confirmed that the vehicle had indeed been imported via a syndicate using military officers as duty-free. My friend was thrown out and told to tell the owner to contact KRA. As far as I know, the owner did not contact KRA and the vehicle was subsequently auctioned off (by then my friend was absolutely not interested in the car anymore).

So I guess the consequences are that you don’t get to enjoy your car at all for fear of losing it. It’s either go with it to KRA or sell it for parts.

What interests me is what rights do we as owners who follow all the proper steps including verifying with KRA then 7(!) years later they wake up and say sorry, but your car is dirty. Even worse, on the copy of records KRA shamelessly states “Copy of records is not a certificate of compliance. Confirm duty status from customs services”. If I understand that correctly, KRA registers cars without confirming whether the cars are compliant! If that isn’t an abdication of duty (pun unintended), I seriously don’t know what is.

It seems like buying a car nowadays is a gamble and the full responsibility lies with KRA. I have heard severally from different sources that even KB registered Probox’s are extremely dicey cars to buy locally.

they are demanding duty of kshs 389564 on a toyota 110 valued at 350k si afadhali kuibomoa na kuuza parts zake?

Not really.

KRA is tapping in the dark here. Their internal bookkeeping as mentioned by @Goliath is so bad they simply don’t know which cars are clean or which are dirty. That is why they are asking for the cars and receipts to be brought to them so they can check. If their internal systems were working, they would just pounce on the cars. Incredibly, they have no idea whether the cars on the list they issued were fully paid for or not and I suspect the list is way much higher than they are letting us know. Recall in 2007 same thing happened and KRA published an ad yet a majority in this new list are from 2004-5 which somehow slipped through.

If you recall the rumors of how a certain PNU MP made his initial millions via KRA through cheque kiting, then it is obvious what is going on in KRA. Whatever else we are told by them, their internal procedures are barely working and they are hemorrhaging money on a serious scale. So it is much easier for them to issue such demand notices, scare wanainchi into paying up to cover up their internal failures and not have to deal with them because they basically don’t want to. That is why they are blaming the transition to a new system for this latest happening.

Question: if common employees of KRA know the top echelons are seriously feasting, how in the world do you expect to stop a clerk from engaging in corruption on a morality basis? It’s completely impossible.