The Practice, Challenges, and Prospects of e-Government: the Case of Ethiopian Revenue and Customs Authority (ERCA) Large Taxpayers Office (LTO)
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Date
2015-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The economic imperative of ICT on public agencies is becoming paramount. Accordingly, ERCA
has been automating its tax assessment and collection systems, which it claims assist to achieve
increase in its tax revenue. This increase, however, is reported to be low compared to the tax base of
the economy. Other studies have also revealed high administrative burden for paying taxes and
noncompliance to tax laws that result for the country to lose millions of income from tax revenue.
The study aimed to examine how well e-Government is recognized and comprehensively rolled out
as a strategic tool to solve such drawbacks on existing tax administration systems at ERCA LTO.
ERCA has been investing to reform its tax administration system. However, the changes made are
not harmonized with the national e-Government plan, focusing only to reach around 1,000 large tax
payers (than its potential capacity to expand the tax base), not striving towards bringing holistic e-
Government, and is mostly piecemeal. The overall level of satisfaction of large taxpayers on
ERCA’s website as a primary source of one-stop-shopping portal is also found to be only 52%. In
terms of the stage of e-Government, ERCA is found at its emerging stage where most of its e-
Services are informational (static) than transactional. Benchmarking of its e-Services with selected
Sub-Saharan African countries has also revealed that a lot has to be done for ERCA to evolve its e-
Service to a stage where all its services are integrated in seamless manner; fiscal transparency is
enhanced; knowledge management (for example to control tax evasion) is optimized; and e-
Payment augments e-Filing. To address these findings, the study recommends a more robust
transformational change, than mere automating of existing process, towards the higher stages of e-
Government directed by a comprehensive e-Government strategic plan
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Large taxpayers office