The High Court’s recent decision in Commissioner of Investigation & Enforcement v. Hanqing Zhao [2025] eKLR raises significant procedural and interpretational questions under Section 51 of the Tax Procedures Act (TPA).

In this case, the Court held that a taxpayer’s objection becomes valid only once lodged through the iTax system, reasoning that manual or email objections lack the formal attributes—such as reference numbers and timestamps—needed for statutory recognition. Consequently, it found that the Commissioner’s Objection Decision dated 29th January 2024 was made within time since the iTax objection was lodged on 30th November 2023.

With respect, I find this conclusion legally and administratively defective. Section 51 of the TPA does not prescribe the mode or platform for lodging an objection. The Act simply provides that a taxpayer “may lodge a notice of objection” within 30 days and that the Commissioner shall issue a decision within 60 days of receiving a valid notice. To insist that only an iTax-lodged objection is valid is, in my view, an overreach and an unwarranted extension of statutory language.

In the present case, the taxpayer had lodged a manual objection on 8th November 2023, well before filing on iTax on 30th November 2023—prompted by the Commissioner’s demand. The Court’s approach effectively nullifies valid acts undertaken within the statutory framework simply because they were not digitized, even though the system and manual processes coexist in practice.

In my tenure at the Kenya Revenue Authority, I had proposed that the issue of manual versus system-based objections and assessments be harmonized and expressly addressed through legislation—perhaps via amendment in a future Finance Act. This gap directly affects computation of statutory timelines and continues to generate needless litigation.
It is time for this conversation to be revisited to ensure that procedural form does not trump substantive justice in tax administration.