The determinants of online tax system: survey evidence from self-employed taxpayers in Nigeria

Abstract

The Federal Inland Revenue Service Board of Nigeria is streamlining the tax administration environment to embrace an online tax system. This will enable taxpayers, especially the self-employed and their representatives to submit their tax returns electronically to the tax authority rather than mailing the paper form. Experiences of other countries have shown that the online tax system can only work effectively with the full cooperation of the taxpayers. However, at the time of this study, little is known about self-employed taxpayers’ usage of the online tax system. This study therefore, examines the determinants of an online tax system with survey evidence from self-employed taxpayers in Nigeria. It also examines the relationship between innovation, technology, the external factor and tax service quality on the online tax system. It further evaluates the mediating effects of tax service quality on innovation, technology and the external factor onto the online tax system by the self-employed taxpayers. An online survey (e-mail) was used for data collection using a simple random sampling method with questionnaires e-mailed to 1,125 self-employed taxpayers. Structural equation modelling technique was used to test the integrated online tax service model. The result shows that innovation, technology and the external factor are significantly important determinants of the online tax system. As such, tax service quality was found to mediate the hypothesized relationship in the model with significant values. The result also indicates that tax service quality significantly mediates the relationship between innovation, technology and the external factor as determinants of an online tax system. Overall, this study provides empirical evidence by expanding the relatively understudied area of the Nigerian tax system. This study paves the way for future research on corporate taxpayers’ usage of the online tax system.