THE INFLUENCE OF FACILITATING CONDITIONS, PERCEIVED BENEFITS, AND PERCEIVED RISK ON INTENTION TO ADOPT E-FILING IN TANZANIA

Abstract

Most tax authorities adopt electronic filing (e-filing) to derive its benefits. Through e-filing, compliance to tax payments is enhanced and tax administration costs are reduced. Despite such e-filing benefits, intention to adopt e-filing for Tanzanian taxpayers is very little. This study therefore, aimed at assessing the facilitating conditions, perceived benefits and perceived risk on intention to adopt e-filing. A survey was conducted covering Coast, DaresSalaam and Mwanza regions to assess the influence of such conditions. A structured questionnaire was administered to a sample of 226 individuals to collect data from tax practitioners. Data on perceived risk (security and confidentiality of information), perceived benefits (saving costs and speed of returns), and facilitating conditions (support and access to computers) was gathered. This data was analysed statistically using factor analysis in order to extract common factors. The developed hypotheses were tested using regression analysis. The results indicate that perceived risk was negatively related to intention to adopt e-filing as proposed by the study, but this was statistically insignificant. Similar to the underlying theory, perceived benefits were positively and significantly related to intention to adopt e-filing and thus the research recommended that tax authorities should put more emphasis on enhancing taxpayers’ perceived benefits by providing e-filing education and creating awareness to improve taxpayers’ intention to adopt e-filing. In contrast to previous studies, the results showed that facilitating conditions were negative and insignificantly related to e-filing adoption. It was observed further that the model explained18.8% of variation in intention to adopt e-filing as the study examined only three factors. These findings are acceptable to social science studies; however, the remaining 81.2% were due to other factors that could be researched.