Tax Accountant at Safaricom Kenya

Key accountabilities and decision ownership:

Health and Safety

• Uphold the company code of conduct, policies and procedures, ensuring integrity and accountability in every aspect of your work.
• All employees have a responsibility to adhere to safety, health, and wellbeing policies, guidelines and procedures in all actions and decisions.
• Preparation of monthly withholding tax and withholding VAT returns together with supporting schedules to ensure filing by the statutory deadlines.
• Preparation of subsidiary corporate tax returns plus supporting schedules for tax filing and accounting reporting purposes.
• Preparation of quarterly instalment tax payments within statutory deadlines.
• Reconcile withholding tax and VAT receivable balances to issued certificates and the GL account and follow up for any outstanding tax certificates.
• Participate in tax planning efforts to assist the business identify areas of tax exposures as well as tax savings opportunities.
• Review of expenses for optimal claim of input VAT credits.
• Ensure import taxes paid by the company are accurately computed and requisite documents to support duty payments are kept.
• Liaise with the Revenue Authority, internal customers and external auditors to ensure tax-related queries and correspondence are addressed in a timely manner.
• Support the analysis and implementation of tax policy changes because of Finance Bill/Act and gazetted tax policy changes.
• Participate in the monthly Balance Sheet Review processes, including adequately preparing the supporting schedules.
• Participate in preparing tax training materials and presenting during this training session.
• Analysis of fixed assets additions for qualifying investment allowances.
• Support in the preparation of information required during statutory and regulatory audits.

Core competencies, knowledge and experience:

Business Competencies

Working with Others

• Consciously takes steps to make the most of every conversation/interaction
• Identifies people s needs, interests and motives to be able to influence the decisions they make
• Communicates simply to excite and engage people
• Builds and maintains strong relationships and networks

Operational Excellence

• Focuses on achieving maximum performance and driving continuous improvement
• Thinks about processes and problems cross-functionally and end-to-end
• Uses knowledge of products, technology, process, systems and policy to solve problems

Creativity and Innovation

• Finds creative ways to exploit opportunities and solve problems
• Takes risks and pushes what is possible
• Experiments with unorthodox approaches

Business Know how

• Uses data and research to make decisions that are competitively and financially robust
• Balances current and future needs
• Thinks and acts like an owner of the business
• Acts in line with legal, regulatory, professional and ethical standards

Working with Change

• Responds flexibly to changing situations
• Manages the business and people aspects of change to drive performance

Functional Competencies:

Planning and Control

• Analyses performance trends to determine the health of the business
• Maintains controls within Financial Systems through setup control and master data management

Accounting

• Prepares, analyses and summaries financial data to support business operations and delivery statutory information
• Ensures the integrity of processes and systems to record and authorize transactions in compliance with Safaricom accounting policies and regulation

Reporting

• Delivers timely and accurate reports to satisfy statutory and business requirements
• Identifies key performance and variances, and provides recommendations

Tax

• Delivers filings/reports to satisfy statutory and business requirements Combines expertise and commercial awareness to deliver value added solutions

Qualifications

Education & Experience:

• Honors degree from a recognized university in business or related field
• At least one full professional qualification in accounting namely CPA, ACCA, CIMA or an equivalent
• A minimum of 4 years proven track record of having worked in a similar role in the Tax field with a progressive accounting firm or a Law firm or with a minimum of 4 years tax and accounting experience in a well-run company
• Key performance indicators:
• Timely filing of tax returns and payment of taxes
• Collaborate with the Finance Shared Services team to deliver outputs in a timely and accurate manner
• Structure transactions to avoid tax gross-up by reviewing contracts, tax legislation including double tax treaties.
• Organize quarterly relationship meetings with the stakeholders
• Satisfactory stakeholder management.
• 100% compliance with tax laws, processes and procedures