An e-tax services adoption model for Uganda: A consumer-based perspective.

Abstract

Governments around the world are transitioning from the traditional tax practices to e-taxation for better service delivery to their citizens. The resulting benefits of e-taxation include cost-free preparation and lodgment of tax returns, safety and security, 24 hour service availability, time saving and speed, less corruption, increased transparency, better delivery of government services, greater convenience, and citizen empowerment through access to information and cost reductions. These benefits however remain largely unrealized in economically transitioning countries due to low adoption of e-tax services by consumers. The low adoption of e-tax in developing countries is a result of governments’ focus on the technical supply-side factors with little emphasis on the consumers’ perspective of e-tax adoption.

In Uganda, the implementation of e-tax service has been done without proper analysis of the factors required for its successful adoption. In addition, there has been inadequate research and development in IT to inform government's uptake of e-tax adoption. While a number adoption models have been proposed and applied to the developed countries, they require domestication in order to address the specific consumer needs of developing nations. Literature revealed that the constructs that are very important for the demand-side were not catered for by the reviewed e-tax adoption models. Out of all the e-tax adoption models reviewed, the one by Davis (1989) was found to be the most appropriate for enhancement because it has been used by some authors for e-tax adoption. This study therefore aimed to determine the factors that explain the low tax adoption rates in Uganda in order to develop a model which can best support consumer-based e-tax adoption in the country. To achieve this aim, a questionnaire based descriptive field study was undertaken to identify the factors that inform e-tax adoption in Uganda. The factors from the results of the field study were used to extend the technology adoption model in order to derive a suitable one for the Ugandan context. The derived model was evaluated in a questionnaire based study using accountants who are e-tax users in Uganda. To evaluate the derived model, a regression analysis was done to explain the relationship between perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use (as dependent variables) and the consumer factors (as the independent variables). The evaluation results showed that three factors namely: training, attitudes and education had significant impact on perceived usefulness and one factor: accessibility had significant impact on perceived ease of use. This model combines the tested strengths of TAM with the consumer factors suitable for e-tax adoption. The model is generic and can be adopted for use by other economically and technologically transitioning countries.