Safaricom PLC has dismissed speculations that its mobile money transfer service M-Pesa was being integrated with the Kenya Revenue Authority(KRA) on Tuesday, January 9, 2024, during a service outage.
Speaking on Friday, Safaricom Chief Finance Services Officer Esther Waititu noted that data sharing between the telecommunication giant and KRA was not permissible since both entities were bound by the Data Protection Act.
“Let me be clear that there was no integration, KRA themselves also publicly spoke that there was no integration happening between M-Pesa and KRA,” Waititu affirmed.
Adding;
“KRA is a separate business entity and Safaricom and M-Pesa specifically are different business entities and when you separate business entities sharing of data is not permissible. We are governed under the Data Protection Act, therefore we cannot share data of our customers.”
Safaricom's statement follows KRA's affirmation of the same.
KRA was responding to an X user who claimed the two entities were being integrated during the one-and-a-half hours of downtime.
"Kindly be advised that this is fake news," KRA flagged the post on X.
Notably, Waititu assured Safaricom users that the inconveniences caused by the widespread service outage that disrupted M-pesa-related transactions including buying of airtime will not be anticipated in the future.
“We recognise this was inconvenient for a lot of our customers, however, the issue has been resolved and services continue to run. We can assure Kenyans and our customers specifically that everything is fine and we do not anticipate any issues going forward,” she stated.
