The effectiveness of e-invoicing in boosting tax income in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

There are several approaches of evaluating the efficiency of the tax system. The authors claim that the absence of tax evasion is evidence of its efficacy. This study is conducted to demonstrate the efficiency and usefulness of electronic invoicing in Saudi Arabia, with the ultimate goal of increasing tax revenue for the Saudi economy. And then there's the matter of contrasting the state of the country's tax coffers before and after the introduction and implementation of e-invoices. This study also looks at how the introduction of e-invoicing in Saudi Arabia and the performance of companies has led to an increase in revenue taxes. The number of VAT rates and their levels in effect in a given nation are two of several variables that affect this occurrence. The purpose of these factors is to examine how the number of VAT rates and the basic VAT rate impact the efficiency of this tax. A literature search in the area of European Union value added tax served as the basis for the investigation. E-invoicing may provide taxpayers with cost savings from reduced printing, storing, and administrative costs, improved information security and accessibility, and integration of invoice issuance with internal accounting, payment, and billing and external supplier, client, and public sector accounting, payment, and procurement systems. Tax administrations may be able to reduce tax noncompliance and informality at a lower cost by reducing sales omission, purchase over-invoicing including the reporting of purchases unrelated to business operations, fraudulent transactions, and general tax submission errors by enhancing control over the invoicing process and enabling real-time monitoring of taxable transactions. Due to the requirement to invest in new information technology and educate new personnel, taxpayers and tax collection agencies may incur large expenditures to adapt to e-invoicing. Administrative categories were used to classify businesses into waves according to their size and regulatory demands. Due to their larger percentage of VAT income and better ability to update IT systems, larger enterprises were more likely to be compelled to deploy e-invoicing earlier. Due to the greater deterrent impact and ease of monitoring their behaviour, the tax administration prioritised the adoption of e-invoicing by taxpayers with a history of noncompliance. 6 In addition, the issue of tax evasion was highlighted, and statistics on the total tax income were provided for companies in different sectors in Saudi Arabia. The study findings for Saudi Arabia in the years 2021 and 2022 follow. We were able to categorize the sectors according to how effectively they kept up the efficiency of VAT collection and how the total income tax had increased between these years. We have also extracted Saudi Arabia’s revenue on taxes in year 2020, 2021 and 2022 to analyze the income performance throughout the years. The research concludes by analyzing the correlation between the preincome tax before the implementation of e-invoicing and after to prove the efficiency of how well e-invoicing are used to generate revenue.