Post Covid-19 and E-Commerce in Malaysia: Tax Compliance Evidence among Youtubers, Instafamous and Facebookers

Abstract

E-commerce has been present for a while, but it was not widely adopted in Malaysia until Covid-19 struck in early 2020. As government places a control movement restriction preventing business from being done at their physical location, more people are engaging in online commerce using social media platforms. Due to absence of rental and employee costs, business owners have shifted their old methods of conducting business to an internet platform. However, the rapid growth of online business via social media platforms and the lack of physical presence have made it difficult for tax enforcement which open the opportunity for tax evasion. Malaysia still does not have rigorous e-commerce tax regulations and enforcement by the time Covid-19 hit and this could result to loss of billions tax revenue in future. Thus, in order to better understand the tax compliance behaviour of online business taxpayers in Malaysia, this research intends to investigate the factors that influence tax compliance behaviour of individuals in the e-commerce industry. Three independent variables were used in this study namely tax knowledge, tax morale and tax complexity. The respondent used are taxpayers who conducted online business through social media platforms namely YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. The study used quantitative analysis where data are collected using 7-point Likert scale and analysed using multiple regression to see the significance of the variables. Using a sample of 158 respondents, analysis showed that online business owner has a poor level of knowledge that their income derived from the online business is taxable. As for tax morale and tax complexity, it shows that each online business owners knows their responsibility to pay tax if they declare. On average, they assume income tax declarations are complicated in terms of forms, computations, and procedures, but this does not lead to poorer tax compliance.