The acceptance of tax e-filing system among salaried taxpayers in Sarawak

The Inland Revenue Board of Malaysia (IRBM) introduced electronic filing (e-filing) for tax returns in 2003 for corporate taxpayers and later in 2006, it was expanded to include individual taxpayers. This service is available for free. After more than 10 years of its implementation, the usage rate shows a positively increasing trends from year to year. This 10-year period should be adequate for the system to be accepted. However, a recent acceptance rate of the system shows only 52.21% salaried taxpayers have used e-filing for tax returns in Malaysia and accordingly Sarawak taxpayers with only 50.43%. This paper studies the salaried taxpayers‟ acceptance of the online system for filing their individual income tax returns, particularly in Sarawak, by using the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model. The aim of the study is to identify the relationship between performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions and the acceptance of tax e-filing system. Another objective is to determine the significant factor of tax e-filing system acceptance in Sarawak. To gather information, about 630 self-administered questionnaires were distributed to the respondents and the data was used to measure the relationship by using several analysis: T-Test, One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Pearson Correlation Coefficient and Multiple Regression. The findings show that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, facilitating conditions and social influence have a significant and positive relationship on behavioral intention in using tax e-filing system. Performance expectancy, facilitating conditions and social influence found as significant determinant in this study, whiles, effort expectancy were not significant. Since the IRBM is currently taking steps to enhance services delivery of the tax e-filing system, the results may assist the IRBM to plan a more effective strategy in term of designing the tax e-filing system to better serve salaried taxpayers in Malaysia