The acceptance of e-filing among the individual taxpayers

• Main Authors: Abdul Manaf, Nor Aziah, Ishak, Zuaini, Abdul Warif, Suraya
• Other Authors: Mendel, Jonathan
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: CCH Australia Limited 2010
• Subjects: HJ Public Finance; T Technology (General)
• Online Access: http://repo.uum.edu.my/3343/1/Nor1.pdf; http://repo.uum.edu.my/3343/; http://www.atax.unsw.edu.au/news/docs/2010/TaxAdmin_Conference_2010.pdf

e-Filing is an important application that automates tax related processes in an attempt to improve efficiency in assessing and collecting tax information.It has the potential to improve tax-filing service while at the same time reducing costs to both taxpayers and tax collecting agencies. However, despite the readily available tax preparation software and its promotion by the government, only 20% of all Malaysian taxpayers switched to e-Filing in 2007 and most taxpayers still comfortable using the manual method, submitting via paper forms. Thus, the problem of under-utilization still remained and plagued the governments. Understanding why the taxpayers accept or reject and what are their perception towards e-Filing has proven to be a challenging issues. The growing interest in e-government thus raises the question of how the tax authority can increase the taxpayers adoption of e-Filing. Therefore, this research tries to identify factors that influenced the acceptance of e-Filing amongst the individual taxpayers based on Combined Technology Acceptance Model & Theory of Planned Behavior (CTAMJTPB) Four major factors being identified which may have a relationship on influencing the usage of e-Filing among the individual taxpayers. The factors are: Perceived usefulness (PU), Perceived ease of use(PEU), Perceived Behavioral Control (PBC) and Perceived Risk (PR). The findings from 187 usable questionnaires show that perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use are the two variables that have significant relationships with the acceptance of e-Filing. When the significant effects of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use (TAM constructs) on behavioral intention were observed, perceived usefulness exerting a stronger influence than perceived ease of use.