Payroll Compliance
The Affordable Housing Levy on Payroll: What Employers Still Get Wrong
The Housing Levy looks like the simplest line on a Kenyan payslip. The mistakes come from its base, its employer match and the way it now interacts with PAYE.
Every employee needs a P9 to file their return, and every error on it comes back to HR. Most of those errors were made in January, not in the month the P9 is printed.
By StepUp HR Experts
The P9 is the annual certificate an employer gives each employee showing their pay, deductions and PAYE for the year. Employees use it to file their individual income tax return with KRA, which is due by 30 June.
That makes the P9 an unusual document. It is produced by payroll, but it is read by the employee and checked against KRA's records. If the figures do not match what was remitted, it is the employee who sees the problem first, and HR who hears about it.
It is tempting to treat the P9 as a year-end report. In reality, a P9 is just twelve months of payroll added together. If any of those months were wrong, the P9 is wrong.
The common causes:
Corrections made outside payroll. A salary underpaid in March is topped up by a manual bank transfer in April, with no tax applied. The P9 does not show it, and KRA eventually will.
Mid-year changes not reflected. An employee's pension contribution, relief or benefit changes in June, but payroll keeps the old setting.
Benefits left out. Taxable benefits such as a company car or housing must be included. If they never went through payroll, they will not appear on the P9.
Leavers forgotten. Someone who left in May still needs a P9 for the months they worked. Ex-employees are the people most likely to be missed and least likely to forgive it.
A short reconciliation before P9s go out saves weeks of queries afterwards.
If the totals do not agree, find the difference before issuing anything. Reissuing corrected P9s to the whole company is far worse than a week's delay.
There is no reason to wait for June. Employers who issue P9s early in the year give staff time to file, spot errors and ask questions while the payroll team still remembers what happened.
Late P9s also create a predictable crunch: a large number of employees asking for their certificate in the same fortnight before the filing deadline.
An employee with two jobs receives two P9s, and has to watch for the second-job personal relief problem, and needs both to file correctly. Each employer only knows its own figures. Make sure the P9 is clear about what it covers, and do not try to adjust one employer's certificate for the other job.
When payroll is run in a system rather than a spreadsheet, P9s are simply the year's records, already calculated and already reconciled against what was remitted.
StepUp HRM generates P9 forms for a single employee or for the whole company in one step, including people who left during the year. Employees can download their own P9 from the self-service app, so HR is not emailing PDFs one at a time in June.
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