Income Tax Awareness and Tax Education Among College Faculty Members in Kathmandu Valley

Abstract

The objectives of the study are to examine the level of income tax awareness and 
income tax education of the college faculty members. The faculty members are 
from the colleges in Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, comprising permanent and part
time faculty members. Nepal has adopted a self-assessment system in the Income 
Tax Act, 2058 (2002). The current tax system assumes that the taxpayer has a 
sufficient level of knowledge of the tax legislation to be able to perform this 
independently. Tax literacy is not an option. It's a fundamental duty of the law. The 
study used a descriptive quantitative research design. The data were obtained from 
100 faculty members using a questionnaire consisting of 30 items on a Likert scale. 
There were five independent variables: taxpayer attitude and perception, socio
demographic influence, tax education, tax knowledge, and institutional context. 
Income tax awareness was the dependent variable. Frequency, percentage, mean, 
standard deviation, coefficient of variance, and Pearson correlation were used for 
the analysis of the data. The overall awareness was high with a composite mean of 
4.15 out of 5. Tax knowledge, taxpayer attitude, and tax education were also highly 
rated. The five independent variables were found to have positive and significant 
relationships with income tax awareness. The strongest links were with taxpayer 
attitude (r = .52), tax education (r = .58), and tax knowledge (r = .64). The socio
demographic influence and institutional context were less strong but significant (r 
= .35 and .44, respectively). Based on the results, it can be concluded that tax 
education should be structured in order to increase the awareness of tax among 
academic staff and that the colleges do not make full use of their supporting role.