Design and Implementation of a Computerized System for Revenue Generation From Business Premises
CHAPTER ONE
Objectives of the Study
The main objective of this study is to design and develop a computerized revenue management system from business premises. To achieve the stated objective, the following objectives were laid out.
- To review the manually dominated internal revenue processing system currently in use at the Board of internal Revenue with a view to discover problems areas.
- Develop a secured and centralized database which can be accessed from anywhere in the world, providing access to only authorized users
- To design a software application module that will accomplish the following:
- Prepare monthly statement of account from various revenue sources.
- Automatically calculate total revenue from different revenue sources within an Area office and forward the total to head office.
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
Introduction
This chapter is designed to review literature on relevant concepts and theories relating to the research. This chapter provides a theoretical structure of the research highlighting on the vital and relevant definitions, explanations and concepts. Among these concepts and issues are definitions and the historical background of the decentralization and the district assembly concept. The legal framework and the constitutional provision that support the local government system, approaches to revenue generation in the district assemblies as well as challenges and constraints of revenue collection in the district assemblies are among the principal issues discussed in this chapter. Also considered in this section are the ICT policy and its role in revenue collection at the district level in addition to a case study of the use of ICT in revenue generation in other countries.
Historical Evolution of Local Governance
Decentralization is a mechanism for bringing government closer to the governed and helps to improve public administration by empowering local authorities to be the planning and decision-making bodies and thereby enhancing the capacity of government to achieve local participation.
The use of local authorities to help govern this country started with the colonial authorities that used the traditional rulers (known as chiefs) to help rule the Gold Coast, Nigeria’s name under the colonial rule. The pre-independence period, therefore, saw the so-called native authorities in a system referred to as the indirect rule, as the hub of local government. Various legislations setting up local authorities were enacted. In 1859, municipalities were set up in the coastal towns under the Municipal Ordinance but a Municipal Councils Ordinance was passed in 1953. This was followed by enactment of the Local Government Act, 1961 (Act 54). Under all these legislations, the local bodies were set up and vested with authority specifically for local matters but operated alongside central government agencies that also existed at the local level. Their main responsibility was to provide municipal services and amenities in their localities. However, to address the weaknesses in the local administrative system and its ineffectiveness, the Local Administration Act, 1971 (Act 359) was passed. This could not be implemented until 1974 after an amendment, the Local Administration (Amendment) Decree 1974, NRCD 258, was made to it. Sixty-five District Councils were set up under this Decree with appointed Councilors. However, this new system was also beset with numerous problems and it never worked well.
Local Government Revenue System
A widely found characteristic of local government revenue systems in Africa is the huge number of revenue instruments in use by local authorities (Bahigwa et al, 2004). In several countries, local governments intend to raise taxes, fees and charges they are capable of mobilizing often without worrying excessively about the economic distortions and distributions effects that these instruments may create (Brosio, 2000).
CHAPTER THREE
SYSTEM METHODOLOGY AND ANALYSIS
Introduction
After reviewing related works and presiding on the features and methodologies to adopt, a follow up in discussing the tools intended for system design ensued. Adopted methodologies will then be implemented to create a guide that would aid in the design of the system. The review of closely related works revealed that some of the core functions of a tax administrative system should include registration, filing, returns, payments and audit. Some of these revolve round a sound database and as such it would be imperative for us to build a database that is highly secured and has no element of redundancy. The manual processes of the stated core functions would be re-engineered in a system environment with the output being a “to be” process having established the “as is”. As earlier mentioned, these systems were developed in some form of government-private partnership, hence developing such an advanced system with robust capabilities would require massive support from the tax authority which is not forthcoming.
CHAPTER FOUR
SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION AND TESTING
INTRODUCTION
This section is chiefly the implementation of the application and testing for issues and non-functional properties such as speed and robustness. The test is simply the execution of the implemented application with sample data to ensure that all specified objectives have been met appropriately in order to ensure a high quality, user friendly application. The different tests to be carried out would be expatiated further in the subsequent sections.
CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
CONCLUSION
Economic Growth Monitoring is an important aspect of any developing country particularly Nigeria. The Federal Ministry of Finance which is in the position to monitor and forecast Economic Growth has for some time now been running their office activities manually as this project demonstrates that computer can actually eradicate some abnormalities in Economic Growth Monitoring system in the Federal Ministry of Finance. This led to the design of a computer-based solution for Economic Growth monitoring system that will help to forecast economic growth properly
Due to the numerous difficulties involved in computerizing a manual system, it is imperative that the analyst commences with an explicit and unambiguous definition of the functions, objectives and limitations of the current system. This is so because it is easy to lose sight of the actual direction the study should follow when buried under a heap of tedious tasks. Though computers provide a lot of flexibility, I nonetheless recommend and pronounced them as a remedy to the economic growth monitoring sections in federal ministry of finance’s short comings.
However, as the study advanced, so did the conviction grow that any hypothesis was consistent with the result obtained. I am therefore confident in stating that Federal Ministry of Finance needs a more realistic computerization if it is going to be capable of performing at efficient levels.
RECOMMENDATION
However, as a result of Time constraint, I was unable to carry along every department available in the Ministry; so I am of the opinion that this work be assigned to other students so they can work on other part of this work.
In that view, I recommend that the safety of information within the Economic Growth Monitoring System be ensured in a systematic manner. Adequate means of “backup” disc files should be done at each run time. Preferably, the backup process should be done during the update routine and the resulting files dumped onto a secondary storage device. Hence, when any of the files in use are lost or accidentally destroyed, the update program can be used to retrieve the duplicate stored in the back-up.
The researcher also hereby recommends that the federal ministry of finance turn to Electronic Data processing (EDP) systems
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