EGovernment Business Strategies and Services to Citizens: An analysis of the Australian e-tax system

Governments are pursuing initiatives to deliver their services on-line in order to provide better service to citizens as well as to reduce their own business costs. Designing good applications is not just a matter of developing good technical solutions. The context in which the application will be used is also important. One application with the potential to benefit both government and citizens is on-line lodgement of personal income tax returns. Properly implemented, this could mean considerable savings of time and administrative costs for the government and provide citizens with an inexpensive, convenient and speedy way to complete their annual tax obligations. This paper analyses the development and implementation of the Australian on-line tax lodgement system known as e-tax. Analysis of data from the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) identifies patterns of e-tax use, characteristics of users and the users’ evaluation of the e-tax system. The analysis indicates that e-tax is successfully used by a growing number of tax payers but that the up-take rates of e-tax are lower than might be expected. The spread of e-tax will depend on more than just the viability of the technical product. The ATO will need to deal with a variety of complex contextual factors in its plans to promote e-tax. This analysis highlights some broader issues related to electronic service delivery (ESD) and eGovernment.