IT Support Data Exchange Between Tax and Government Agencies

Tax evaders exploit the lack of communication between government and tax agencies to misreport their incomes. Within most African Tax administration where the self-assessment regime is in place, this problem would best be curbed through exchanging information to verify taxpayer declarations. By now, many government agencies use electronic information systems that collect diverse data that can be used to enforce compliance. Although this such automation has been a milestone at Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) and other government agencies in Africa, it is still hard to obtain data outside an agency or their country jurisdictions. If obtained, the data would give a more accurate compliance profile of a taxpayer. Current data exchange methods are manual, slow, ineffective and prone to flaws. This paper presents a data sharing framework for distributed tax information systems using a Service Oriented Architecture. It addresses the potential challenges to the implementation of this trust-based exchange framework and how they can be addressed. The results suggest that the service based framework may facilitate a cheaper seamless automatic exchange approach for taxpayer data using existing information systems.....