Examining the Factors Influencing E-Tax Declaration Usage among Academics’ Taxpayers in Jordan

Comments

Responds

Reviewer 1 

The first observation is that it is a well written and structured paper. The topic is interesting and concerns the use of e-tax which is an important service for both the public and private sectors.

Many thanks for your comments. 

The introduction is very good and coherent. However, some more information details ad related references could be useful in lines 61 to 68, better describing how digitized is the Jordanian government. Concerning the income level it would be also beneficial to present it also in USD and discuss briefly some demographics as the proportion of citizens etc that have such incomes and their skills/education and other characteristics (i.e. profession etc.). Line 106 parenthesis.

Some more examples were added in line 43 and two more references were added in in line 69.

Related to the income tax , some information about the income tax in Jordan were added in the lines 82-84

Line 106, the parentheses were added 

Lines 101 to 106 are rather vague, a better analysis of the theory is required. Lines 135 to 141 are crucial, expand with additional studies and analyse more.

In general, this part needs more detailed analysis of the theories and more studies substantiated your hypotheses. This is essential and subject to major revision.

Thank you for highlighting this point. We have elaborated on the Model development and hypotheses section.

I am not sure why you need hypotheses H2, H4 and H6 which are rather general and have been analysed before. Consider revising and focusing more on e-tax. Then you can probably generalise some of these results concerning the theory.

We would like to thank the reviewer for this comment. H2, H4 and H6 were dropped as suggested by the reviewer, as the remaining hypotheses will be sufficient to answer the research objectives and focus on the main scope of the study.   Moreover, this action is also consistent with the underlining theory.   

Line 148 previous research – which research? Line 164 why ‘Despite the commonly held belief that knowledge does not influence the acceptability of digital payment systems’ – why it is commonly held belief? And then in line 167 and 168 why are there inconsistencies?

Thanks for highlighting these points, two supporting references were added to the statement in line 128 (previously line 148) as follows:

            Chen, C., Perceived risk, usage frequency of mobile banking services. Managing Service Quality: An International Journal, 2013.

            Mohammadi, H., A study of mobile banking loyalty in Iran. Computers in Human Behavior, 2015. 44: p. 35-47.

Also, we explained more on the the awareness moderating rule on the relationship between subjective norms and e-tax declaration usage, and added supporting references as follows:

            Lee, I., et al., Culture-technology fit: Effects of cultural characteristics on the post-adoption beliefs of mobile Internet users. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 2007: p. 11-51.

            Literacy, S.F.a.B. Central bank of Jordan. 2017  27-10-2022]; Available from: http://www.cbj.gov.jo/Pages/viewpage.aspx?pageID=202.

Lines 172 to 175 are rather general and not useful. Lines 181 to 186 are brilliant justification. Excellent sample, description and methodology.

Thank you for your comment. General information in lines 172 to 175 were eliminated, as these basic details were implicitly explained in lines 181 to 186.  

3.2 You describe what you do and it looks very good – why not expand and include the items in another table than 4 – more transparent and would strengthen your methods. Also table 4 looks a little loaded – you can break it and discuss the key sections of the subjective norms, usage etc in separate arts and thus better link them to your hypotheses.

Thank you for pointing this to the authors. The measurement items with codes were added to a new table (e.g. Table 2), and the numbers of the other tables were updated after adding the table (e.g. Table 2).         

The measurements items for all constructs were moved from Table 4 ( after change become Table 5) to Table 2 ( new table)   

Very good analysis – the correlation matrix and line 245 are key – however, you can discuss a little bit about the threshold and other studies. So expand more than reference 35.

Thank you.

Based on suggestions by Kock and Lynn (2012) and Kock, N. (2017), more explanation was provided, which includes; the threshold of VIF values must be less than 3.3 (based on Kock, 2017) rather than less 5 based on the suggestions by Hair (reference [35]).

Kock, N. (2017). Common method bias: a full collinearity assessment method for PLS-SEM. In Partial least squares path modeling (pp. 245-257). Springer, Cham.

Kock, N., & Lynn, G. S. (2012). Lateral collinearity and misleading results in variance-based SEM: An illustration and recommendations. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 13(7), 546–580.

Very solid analysis afterwards too. As I said before you might want to break the table to smaller tables.

Line 280 Great! That is the essence – why do you care about some other general hypotheses. I am fine with it but I think it weakens the scope of your study.

General hypotheses (e.g. H2, H4 and H6) were drooped to focus on the scope of the study.

I feel that Table 7 lines 312 to 326 should be better explained. Explain what Q is and how it is used in related studies.

The rule of thumb of Q² > 0 based on (Hair et al., 2014) and (Falahat et al., 2022) added to the text.

At this point I want to highlight that you should discuss and compare how your results are consistent or not with other relevant studies.

Thanks for rasing this point, we highlighted the comparisoins between our results and previous accordingliy throughout the text, some examples:

            Line 340: The results in Table 6 shows that AVE's square root for each variable was higher than the variable shared with other variables [48].

            Line 372: The results of the structural model analysis confirmed the TBP’s assumptions by providing evidence of the Jordanian perceptive on knowledge and awareness, the two ex-ternal constructs to TPB.

            Line 374: Despite the fact that knowledge is found to have a positive effect on e-tax declaration usage, the results of the study does not  provide evidence on the moderating effect of awareness in the relationship between attitude and e-tax declaration usage.

            Line 381: The results, however, supported the direct positive effect of subjective norms, knowledge and attitude on e-tax deceleration usage

            Line 383: The limited volume of research in this area increases the importance of this study, moreover, using structural equation modeling allows the factors examined in this paper to be used as both independent and dependent variables in the model.

Line 403 I think the sample was not small – you can argue it was limited – but I think it is a very good sample. Future research could look at other countries etc.

The statement was rewritten as follows;

“Firstly, it is recognized that the sample size was limited to academics in Jordanian public universities, and therefore, it is advisable to expand participants from other taxpayers to confirm the results”.

-----“Moreover, future studies may test the current research model using data from other countries.” 

In general, I liked a lot the idea, sample and statistical analysis. This is certainly a publishable paper and contribution. However, I suggest a rather major revision (which might be rather minor) since the authors should better analyse the theory and most importantly/essentially present related studies and compare the findings with your study.

Many thanks, already discussed in the previous points.

Reviewer 2

The current paper tries to elaborate on a common problem regarding e-government services, namely the factors that influence their usage. It comprises an interesting work, with a case study for the e-tax declaration service in Jordan.

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General comments: The structure of the paper could be reconsidered. In particular, section 2 could be entitled as “Background” and include relevant models and theories used for identifying factors influencing e-government service usage, as well as a short background on e-government in Jordan.

Thanks a lot for highlighting these points, we updated the structure of the paper to include the suggested changes as follows:

            We restructured the section “Theory and Hypotheses Development” accordingly.

            Line 40 added: There is a reasonable doubt that the low acceptance by citizens of e-services in developing countries is still evident despite the quality of services provided by governments [3]. It is argued that their low acceptance results from governments’ poor efforts in implementing good governance in terms of transparency, accountability, and anti-corruption [4].

            Line 63 added: There are several projects and initiatives done by the Jordanian government aimed to accomplish digital transformation across all governmental sectors such as “digital educational content, open government information and data”.

            Line 195 added: Spreading financial awareness and literacy could be highly critical for e-services acceptance [27]. As the government raises public awareness, citizens will become better informed on the benefits and importance of adopting e-services; e-tax declaration usage.

Section 3, entitled as “Methodology”, could include the steps of the methodology used for this research, the particular model developed for the aims of the paper, as well as the relevant hypotheses, sampling and measurement instruments.

Table 1 and its description in the text should be included in section 4, since they regard results of the study.

·        The developed model was discussed in part (2. Model development and hypotheses) based on the underpinning theory and previous related studies.

·        The sampling technique and data collection were discussed in part 3.1 (under section 3. Methodology).

·        Measurement instruments are discussed in part 3.2, and the measurement items are shown in a new Table (e.g., Table 2). The sources of measurement items were discussed in the text (part 3.2).

·        Table 1 and its description are moved to section 4. 

A spelling and grammar check is recommended to be undertaken (e.g. lines 34, 62, 82, 87, 369), including the paper title. Also, the title could be improved by adding the word “service” after “e-tax declaration”.

It was thoroughly proofread.

Regarding the Introduction section: it can be modified so as to depict more accurately the scope and objectives of the paper. More specifically, in the Introduction and Abstract, terms that express different notions are used for presenting the scope of the paper. For example in the title and abstract it is stated that the paper examines “e-tax declaration usage” and “provides guidance for improving citizens’ acceptance”. In lines 91-92 it is stated that “this paper aims to shed light on factors that determine the users’ experience with using e-tax declaration usage”.

Also, the problem that this paper tries to leverage could be more clearly identified and stated; as well as supported by relevant bibliography. It is advised to strengthen the motivation of the paper. Answering the following questions could be useful: 

·        “is there a difference in mandatory and voluntary e-government service usage?”;

·        “since e-tax declaration is a mandatory service, is there evidence from Jordan that its usage is low?”.

·        Lines 36-38: The argument could be supported with more recent bibliography.

·       Line 91- 92 ; the term of “ users’ experience” was replaced with “ e-tax declaration usage”

·       Line 36- 38: more recent referrences added (e.g., Twizeyimana, J. D., & Andersson, A. (2019); Alzahrani, L., Al-Karaghouli, W., & Weerakkody, V. (2017). )

Regarding the “Model development and hypothesis”: since, in literature there are other models for exploring the factors of e-government service adoption (e.g. UTAUT) it is suggested to justify the particular model used in this work,

In addition, the descriptions of Hypothesis 4 and Hypothesis 6 could be properly clarified. Although H4 refers to the factor of knowledge and H6 refers to the factor of awareness, both seem to refer to the awareness on the benefits of using e-government systems (lines 156-157, 164-165). This, is also evident in the conclusions section (lines 385-389).

-        We would like to thank the reviewer for this comment. We have added a justification for using TPB in this work.

-        As for the second point: hypothesis: Hamzah (could be deleted)

As explained above, general hypotheses (e.g. H2, H4 and H6) were drooped to focus on the main research scope. 

As far as the sample is concerned, Internet or digital device usage are not included in the demographic criteria. Is there a justification? 

Recent data reported in 2021 published by https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2021-jordan  showed that; 

1- 66.8 % of the Jordanian population used the internet in January 2021.

2-The number of mobile connections in Jordan in January 2021 was equivalent to 78.2% of the total population. 

Thus, since the targeted sample is the academic taxpayers, they are expected to use the internet or digital devices.  

Finally, the conclusions section is analytically presented. It is better to replace “managers” with “decision makers in government”

Thank you for this suggestion.