empirical study of factors influencing acceptance of e-government services in india
Around the world, governments have increased the use of Information and Communication Technologies to improve public services delivery and dissemination of information to public. Most of the developed nations are at the advanced stage of e-governance implementation while the developing nations have increased their focus only in the last decade. Among the developing countries, India has made significant progress in the technical implementation of e-governance benefitting from the easy availability of technical resources in-house, highly professional civil services and committed leadership. However, the adoption and dissemination is constrained on one hand by digital divide and on the other hand by the issues related to the adoption of technology. One of the most important and advanced e-governance initiatives, e-filing of income tax returns, is a glaring example where just 10\% of the total returns filed in 2009 were through e-filing [18]. This requires examination of the factors influencing the citizen's adoption of e-government services. Since e-filing has been a flagship implementation of e-governance in India and has a huge potential for cost savings, this study focused on the individual tax payer's adoption of e-filing. The study is based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model and is extended to include perceived risk and user experience with computer systems and tax calculations. To test the model, a survey was administered to 189 taxpayers and regression analysis is used to test the model hypotheses. The result supports the impact of perceived risk on the behavioral intention. The tax payers are not comfortable with the transaction happening without face to face contact and are worried that their personal information will leak into third parties. Thus, in order to attract taxpayers for e-filing, the government has to improve the performance expectancy, effort expectancy and provide confidence to tax payers about the safe and risk free system.
e-government diffusion technology adoption