The short answer
It depends which question you are asking, because two different ones get called verification. If you RECEIVED an invoice and want to know it is genuine, what you can check is whether the document carries the particulars a tax invoice is required to carry, and the place to confirm anything you intend to rely on is KRA. If you ISSUED one and want to know it reached KRA, that is not a question about the document at all: it is a question about whether your own system transmitted it, and your system is where the answer is.
What the rules say
This page explains how a requirement generally works. It is not tax advice, and it cannot account for the specifics of any one business. For a position you intend to rely on, confirm with KRA directly or with a registered tax agent.
Tax rules in Kenya change with each Finance Act and with regulations made during the year. Before acting on any figure, deadline or threshold, check the current position on KRA's own website.
What we are not stating here. Some of the specific requirements relating to this topic have not yet been verified against their primary source by our reviewer, so they are withheld from this page rather than stated from memory. That means you will not find a threshold, rate, deadline or penalty figure below. For those, check KRA directly. Everything else on this page explains how the mechanism works and is not affected.
The two questions people are actually asking
A supplier hands you an invoice and you want to know it is real. Or you issued one this morning and you want to know KRA has it. These sound like the same question and are not. The first is about a document in front of you. The second is about whether a transmission left your premises, which the document cannot tell you either way, because a document can look completely correct and never have been sent.
Checking an invoice you received
What is checkable without contacting anyone is whether the document carries what a tax invoice is required to carry. The requirement is stated above with its source, and the practical version is that the supplier must be identifiable, the document must carry its own serial number and date, what was supplied must be described rather than summarised as "goods", and where you intend to claim the purchase against your own tax, your PIN has to be on it. An invoice missing your PIN is a problem you want to find now rather than at the end of the year.
What this page will not tell you
We do not publish a lookup procedure or point you at a screen, because the interfaces change and a set of steps written from memory is worse than none: you would follow it, fail, and not know whether the invoice or the instructions were wrong. If you need certainty about a specific document, KRA is the party that can give it, and that is not a limitation of this page so much as the honest position.
Checking one you issued
This is the more common worry and the easier one. Whatever you issue from is the thing that knows whether the invoice transmitted, and every channel shows this somewhere. The failure modes are documented separately because they have different fixes: an invoice that was refused, one that seems to have gone nowhere, and a queue that has stopped moving are three different problems.
The habit that prevents most of this
Businesses that never have to investigate an invoice are not the ones with better software. They are the ones who capture the buyer's PIN at the counter while the customer is still standing there, rather than promising to sort it out later, and who notice on the day when something stops transmitting rather than at the end of the month.
Common questions
How do I know this information is current?
Tax rules in Kenya change with each Finance Act and with regulations made during the year. Before acting on any figure, deadline or threshold, check the current position on KRA's own website.
Related questions
Sources
- officialeTIMS (Electronic Tax Invoice Management System) — Kenya Revenue Authority, checked 2026-09-18
- officialeTIMS taxpayer portal — Kenya Revenue Authority, checked 2026-09-18
- officialTax Procedures Act, 2015 (Act No. 29 of 2015) — National Council for Law Reporting (Kenya Law), checked 2026-09-18
- officialValue Added Tax Act, 2013 (Act No. 35 of 2013) — National Council for Law Reporting (Kenya Law), checked 2026-09-18
- officialKenya Revenue Authority — Kenya Revenue Authority, checked 2026-09-18