| Abstract | Nepal started to digitize its government so that government services could be delivered online. In 2008, the Inland Revenue Department (IRD), which is in charge of collecting taxes also went online. This study was inspired by the fact that there has been no official evaluation of the e-services provided by the IRD.
The purpose of this study is to evaluate the online income tax filing service of Nepal, which was achieved by dividing research into 3 main phases. In the first phase, current
status of online income tax filing service was evaluated in terms of usage, benefits,
functionalities, leadership, benefits and problems. It was found that the online tax filing
service provided many benefits to taxpayers, and that Nepal only has 50% of tax compliance.
Second phase includes the evaluation framework development and framework
validation by the experts at IRD, which is used to develop the draft questionnaire and
conduct pilot study. One of the criteria in the framework is website quality and its
indicators are website simplicity, relevant information and clear information organization. Another criterion is usability and its indicators are efficiency,
effectiveness, learnability and error tolerance. Next criterion is service quality and its
indicators are online user support, responsiveness, reliability and empathy. Another
criterion is trust and indicators are secure financial transactions, privacy of personal
information and trust in business continuity. The last criterion, which is also named the same as its indicators are transaction notification, policy awareness notification and
service awareness.
In the third phase, the final survey questionnaire, which is based on indicators, was
distributed to taxpayers all over the country. Quantitative data analysis was done to
measure the metrics of the results, which was extracted by analyzing frequency of
responses. The results revealed that taxpayers are the unhappiest with the taxpayer
portal being frozen or hanged while filing taxes, unhappy with the attitude and
responsiveness of tax officers at the tax office, and that they didn’t have adequate online
user support. Survey revealed that most respondents would like to receive SMS or email
notifications for their transactions and if a new policy is introduced. |