The Effect of Tax Administration on Tax Revenue Performance in Rwanda

The Government of Rwanda continued to carry out tax reforms over the years with an aim of improving taxation efficiency and increasing the amount of revenue raised to finance the government expenditure. In year 2000, The Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA) embarked on the decentralization process and further strategies were implemented such as Taxpayers education and electronic tax system to mobilize and increase tax revenue collections. However, despite the RRA employed strategies, the failure to collect all the potential tax revenue is persisting, and the tax-to-GDP ratio is lower than their target, EAC and SSA average ratio. The purpose of this study was to establish the relationship between the Tax Administration and Tax Revenue Performance in Rwanda. The population of the study consisted of 1, 093 RRA staff reported by the Human Resource department (2017). This population consisted of RRA staff involved in day-to-day Tax Administration in Rwanda. It included Commissioners and Deputy Commissioners, Senior Officers, Officers. The sample size comprised staff from all RRA departments. The sample size was 400 respondents. The respondents composed by of 10 commissioners and deputy commissioners, 157 Senior Officers, and 233 Officers. Primary data was collected from the responses of the questionnaires and oral interviews to measure the effectiveness of Tax Administration and the level of Revenue performance in RRA. Data was collected from the primary source compiled, sorted, edited for accuracy and clarity, classified, coded into a coding sheet and was analyzed using a Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS 16.0). And strong positive relationship between variables was observed. In conclusion, there is a strong positive relationship between tax administration and tax revenue performance, this implies that if the level of Tax administration is high, performance in tax revenue is also high and if the level of Tax Administration is low, the performance is also low. Therefore Tax administration is a matter of serious concern to take care of by many developing countries, to raise tax revenues for developmental purposes. The four independent variables that were studied, explain 85.8 % of variance in tax revenue collection as represented by the R2. This therefore means that other factors not studied in this research contribute 14.2 % of variance in tax revenue collection. The F critical at 5 % level of significance was 5.33. Since F calculated is greater than the F critical (value = 595.655), this shows that the overall model was significant. The significance is less than 0.05, thus indicating that the predictor variables, explain the variation in the dependent variable which is Tax Revenue Collection. In conclusion, there is a strong positive relationship between tax administration and tax revenue performance. The management should understand that proper tax administration is necessary in order to raise adequate tax for social and economic development of the country. Rwanda Revenue Authority management needs to determine what actions to do to ensure that it collects sufficient tax revenue.