Abstract

Taxation is the primary source of revenue for governments throughout the world to implement their political, social-economic agendas and to deliver services to the citizens. In Kenya, increased government recurrent expenditure, capital expenditure, and the need to finance both national and county government activities using local sources of funds has called for the government to bring into the tax net sectors that have remained untaxed before. In the finance bill of 2012/2013, a lot of emphasis was put on rental income as a subject of taxation. Previous economic statistics records of KRA and Treasury indicate that less than half of property owners and developers had complied with these tax requirements. This study was carried out to establish how property owners have responded to the property taxation measures, and the factors that influenced their compliance such as perception, human resource, tax education and cost of compliance to rental income tax in Kenya. To achieve this objective, the researcher used both primary and secondary data. Primary data was collected by seeking opinion from a sample of 210 property owners, sampled from the seven KRA regions using telephone interview questionnaires. While secondary data was collected from revenue records of KRA, previous studies carried out by researchers on rental income tax both globally and locally for the purpose of comparison. Data collected was analyzed by using the statistical software program namely Statistical Package for Social science (SPSS) version 20. The quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive statistics (frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation) and a number of techniques of analysis was used including Reliability test, Correlation and Multiple Regressions. According to the responses of the taxpayer’s rental income tax compliance in Kenya is influenced by: age, current occupation, financial constraints, referent group influence, educational level of taxpayers, awareness of taxpayers, perception of tax fairness, opportunity cost of evading, tax education, government incentives, trust of the tax collector, tax collection procedures and tax audits. Based on the findings of this study the possible recommendation includes: developing taxpayer’s capacity of understanding tax, upholding tax fairness and equity, developing capacity of tax authority, improve taxpayers trust on the authority, government to provide social services to the public to get trust from the society who will in turn reduce tax evasion.