Jusletter IT

Governments can assume e-taxation as source of benefits such as: reducing time and money expenses and improving the quality of the taxation process. From the taxpayers’ point of view, e-taxation also can brings positive outcome such as: money and time savings together with improving the convenience of taxation procedures However, these benefits cannot persuade all taxpayers to move online because of lack of ICT readiness or their personal beliefs. In that case, the government can apply different strategies: different benefits, free ICT infrastructure, persuading and even obligate taxpayers to use e-taxation. For improving taxpayers experience in using e-taxation the attention should be paid to the number of aspects such as convenience, functionality, reliability of e-taxation services and convenient training and support services. It is important also to ensure that there are high levels of security and trust into e-taxation services among users. Currently e-taxation initiative in Kazakhstan allows taxpayers to submit any type of tax declaration, track tax duties and fines, which makes it the most advanced e-government service in the country.

Conducted interviews and questionnaires helped to get the general feelings of taxpayers about e-taxation initiatives in Kazakhstan. The findings show us that adoption of e-taxation was done mainly in the first two years and was driven on the one hand by that pressure from tax officials, while on the other hand taxpayers’ intention to adopt it because e-taxation is faster, easier and cheaper than the traditional taxation process. The main factors which shaped taxpayers’ decision to adopt and use e-taxation are ICT readiness and compatibility of e-taxation with other IS. During interview it was found that the problems faced by e-taxation users can be categorized in one of the four areas: technology, training and support, security and trust and rules and regulations. These can be presented in diagram (Figure 1).

These findings from interview were tested during the questionnaires where were founded that:

• In technological aspect users’ main problem is reliability of e-taxation services while convenience and functionality is regarded by the majority as acceptable.
• All training and support services have almost equal importance. All of the available training and support services raised some dissatisfaction among taxpayers. While some of participants expressed interests in availability of interactive and video tutorials.
• Security and trust issue did not rise significant complaints mainly because of low sensitivity of tax data for taxpayers. However, users noted that they have a very low level of trust in the safety of their taxation data, mainly because of the organizational aspect of security.
• Rules and regulations raise huge complaints in discussing the issues of the submitting the same information into Tax Committee and to the Agency of Statistic of Kazakhstan, also another source of dissatisfaction is in the current e-taxation upgrading policy. 

We can suggest that today there is no need in administrative pressure from tax officials. Whereas legal obligation on companies who already have ICT can bring order into adoption process and improve the taxation experience for companies who are not able to introduce ICT into their accountant practice. This also can reduce government’s expenses on providing taxation terminals.

Regarding problems existing today for taxpayers in using e-taxation we can conclude that first of all, for taxpayers more important to have reliable rather than sophisticated services. Also for training and support services more beneficial would be providing them with online training solution as it is cheaper, easy available and more. In addition we found that as long as there will be high level of shadow economy, security of taxation data will not be a subject of great concern among taxpayers even in spite of low level of trust into Tax Committee. Finally, we can conclude that users prefer if government adopted changes first, establish properly functioning back office and only after completely testifying these changes introduce them to taxpayers.

Due to time and funds limitations results have 12% confidence interval which means that we can point only main trends. Also geographical sampling can bring some biases in the result obtained.

MSc Almaz Amirzinov, Technology and Performance Department of KPMG Kazakhstan
Tulepov str.7/31, 100027 Kazakhstan
AlmazKaz@gmail.com
Dr. Anita Greenhill, University of Manchester, Oxford Road M13 9PL
Manchester
A.Greenhill@manchester.ac.uk