Digital Tax Administration and SME Compliance in Northern Nigeria: Evidence From Kaduna State

Despite extensive investment in e-tax platforms across Sub-Saharan Africa, empirical evidence on whether digital tax administration (DTA) translates into Nigeria remains limited and inconclusive. This study examined the effect of DTA on SME tax compliance in Kaduna State, Nigeria, with perceived trust in tax authorities, digital literacy, and internet accessibility as additional predictors. Anchored on the Technology Acceptance Model and Fiscal Exchange Theory, a quantitative cross-sectional design was adopted. Survey data were collected from 390 formally registered SMEs across five commercial local government areas using a multistage sampling procedure. Ordered logistic regression, average marginal effects, and mediation analysis were employed for statistical estimation. Findings reveal that DTA exerts no statistically significant direct effect on compliance (β = 0.030, p = .864), whereas perceived institutional trust emerges as the sole robust predictor-a one-unit increase in trust raises the probability of high compliance by approximately 7.1 percentage points (OR = 1.382, p = .047). Digital literacy registers a counter-intuitive negative association with compliance, while internet accessibility and firm size are non-significant. Mediation analysis indicates that DTA does not significantly build trust in this context, undermining the hypothesized indirect pathway to compliance. These results challenge the prevailing assumption that technology-driven fiscal reforms automatically improve voluntary compliance in infrastructure-constrained environments. The study recommends that digital tax reforms be embedded within broader institutional trust-building strategies, hybrid offline compliance pathways, and sectordifferentiated outreach programs to achieve sustainable revenue mobilization in Northern Nigeria.