Completed Project

Impact of Compulsory e-Payments on Compliance in Eswatini

This paper spurs from the interest of the Eswatini Revenue Authority (partners in the study) and evaluates the impact of the mandate of electronic filing for income taxes, as implemented in Eswatini in September 2020 in response to the COVID emergency. By relying on a rich set of taxpayer-level administrative data from the revenue authority, we measure the effects on filing behaviour. In conjunction, we also explore how a subsequent mandate to use digital payments only to settle tax payments (April 2021) interacts with the e-filing mandate. We complement the quantitative impact evaluation with in-depth interviews to tax officials to uncover some underlying patterns, mostly referring to: 1) the partial take-up of the mandate, 2) how the new data from both platforms is used by the revenue authority.

Researchers

Fabrizio Santoro

Fabrizio is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, and the Research Lead for the second component of the ICTD's DIGITAX Research Programme. His main research interests relate to governance, public finance, and taxation, with a strong focus on impact evaluation methodologies and statistical analysis. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Sussex.

Razan Amine

Razan Amine is a Research Consultant, working as part of the DIGITAX programme. Her research interests include economic development, taxation, and public finance in developing countries. She is also a research manager at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab South Asia (J-PAL SA) managing a range of projects in India. As well as this she engages in research at the University of Oxford, where she recently completed her MSc in Economics for Development and was awarded a scholarship from the Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies. Prior to this, she completed her first master’s degree as a Fulbright Scholar at John Hopkins University SAIS in Washington DC and worked on a range of projects on taxation at the economics department at John Hopkins University. Amine's work with the ICTD does not reflect the work or opinions of J-PAL.

Tanele Magongo

Tanele Magongo is the Manager, Strategy, at the Eswatini Revenue Service (ERS). She is passionate about economic development, public finance, and strategy management. She is a Fulbright Scholarship awardee and holds an MSc in Policy Economics from the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, USA.
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Project Outputs

Working Paper
Mandating Digital Tax Tools as a Response to Covid: Evidence from Eswatini
Research in Brief
Mandating Digital Tax Tools as a Response to Covid: Evidence from Eswatini