The boom of the internet economy and the smartphone explosion currently experienced in South Africa is making it increasingly more convenient for South African residents to purchase electronically supplied goods and services from suppliers located all across the globe with the mere click of a button. The increasing number of purchases online is making it almost impossible for the South African Revenue Service to collect the Value-Added Tax on specifically electronically supplied services purchased from foreign suppliers. It is further placing South African suppliers of similar goods and services in a disadvantaged position in respect of pricing when compared to foreign suppliers. In the 2013 budget speech, the Minister of Finance indicated that the Value-Added Tax implications of the supply of digitised products by foreign suppliers are an area of concern. By July 2013 proposals were contained in the Draft Taxation Laws Amendment Bill to address this very problem. The aim of this study is to critically evaluate the proposed methods to collect Value-Added Tax on electronically supplied services, as contained in the Draft Taxation Laws Amendment Bill through a detailed literature review and critical evaluation. The literature review focuses on sections 7(1)(c) and 14 of the Value-Added Tax Act, the sections of the Value-Added Tax Act which currently regulates the collection of Value-Added Tax on electronically supplied services, as well as the methods used in the European Union and New Zealand to collect Value-Added Tax and Goods and Services Tax on electronically supplied services. The critical evaluation of the proposals identifies shortcomings and provides recommendations to overcome the shortcomings to ensure that the proposed changes will address the concerns and align South African legislation with global practices. The study concludes that, although the proposed changes to the method to collect Value-Added Tax on electronically supplied services are a step in the right direction, there is still work to be done by legislators on the details of the proposals to ensure successful implementation in a South African environment. / Dissertation (MCom)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / am2014 / Taxation / unrestricted

The technological advances in wireless networks, smart phones, social networks, embedded sensor technologies and the wide spread of mobile devices have exposed customers to number of services. With these advanced technological innovations, computing capability and connectivity, customers look forward to get useful services and information by means of their mobile devices anywhere and at anytime thereby saving time and money. The importance of mobile commerce is increasing every day, since the mobile devices are becoming central part of our lives. One of the challenge here is the ability to reinforce the application behavior by utilizing context information. The analysis and utilization of context information is necessary to build intelligent applications and thereby focusing on less user attention by understanding the current situation. The information about the current location of a mobile customer, the time of request, and personal characteristics like nature of work, profession and economic status are utilized by applications to provide accurate context-aware services. Many of context-aware applications focus mainly on user activity, preferences which are not sufficient to provide context-aware intelligent services. However, there are few works in developing an integrated model for analyzing the context information. Many authors describe the context representation using five elements like who, what, where, when and how to provide a user centric view without emphasizing on the feature of generality and structural representation of context parameters. Since context information takes multiple forms, it is essential and necessary to make broad classification which helps application designers and developers to deal with possible contexts and their impact on application behavior. In addition, the context classification enables to understand complex customer situations due to changing mobile environment. Therefore, it is required to design a model which analyzes the context information of customers in a dynamic environment and hence, provide real time accurate service. The design and development of context-aware mobile commerce services requires a general conceptual model which can handle any type of context information for different applications. Due to the dynamic nature of business environment and also the customer preferences keep emerging, there is a need to develop business model which adapts to changing environment. To understand the current situation of customers in such highly dynamic environments and to enable the business transactions quickly among parties involved, it is essential to construct and analyze an integrated view of information from distinct sources. The adaptation of the provided services based on customer needs depends when the relevant context information is self-described in the form of beliefs. The observations made on combination of context information are deduced into beliefs as a result the decision making time to provide service reduces considerably. The aim of the thesis, is to design and develop a context-aware system which has been applied for mobile commerce environment by considering the customer context information. To do this, we have designed two models: the Context-Information, Observation and Belief (C-IOB)model and the commercial business model. The main function of C-IOB model is to support the application to identify a suitable context-aware service and to execute business transaction for a customer by analyzing the context information in the form of beliefs. We classify the used Context Information(CI)into four types: physical, system, application and social environment. The business model discusses the formal description of participants who are involved in commercial business. The C-IOB model The Context Information, Observation and Belief model deduces beliefs on customer, by combination of available context information during transaction execution or service provision. The beliefs represent the various situations of customers based on specific nature of the applications. The beliefs developed about an entity(e.g. ,person, place, thing) are primitive in most theories of decision making so that applications can use these beliefs to identify and execute context-aware services. The C-IOB model reduces the solution search space, since the knowledge about an entity is organized using cognitive factors, which maps user context information into real world observations and beliefs, as a result the decision making time by the system reduces considerably. The five CI -constructs: who, what, where, when and how enable many types of context information acquisition in our work. The commercial business model A commercial business model mainly involves the formal description of business participants who are involved in commercial business transactions. To meet the growing needs and to fulfill high expectations of customers, it is very important that application designers have to address the issue of building viable business models for commercial environment. The business model describes how an enterprise or an organization captures and delivers economical value to customers. In particular, the customers play major role in transactions execution and hence understanding and identifying the needs of customer is an important issue in building the business model for commercial purpose. Mobile Commerce Environment Mobile commerce environment (MCE) is one of the specific forms of commercial business model. It deals with transactions like purchases with the objective of supplying commodities like goods and services to customers using mobile devices. A Mobile commerce environment is established by considering set of customers, vendors and bankers, who are involved in commercial business activities like buying of electronic goods and services. The environment is based on certain factors like the type of customers, the type of transactions and the type of electronic products involved in purchasing. M-commerce is one of the most effective and useful ways of conducting business as the customers are constantly using mobile devices and it significantly assists customers in making transactions anywhere, anytime and thereby improving the customer satisfaction. C-IOB model based mobile commerce environment Mobile commerce applications are required to be flexible, in providing services due to inherent anytime and anywhere paradigm. The traditional systems during commercial business transactions, take large time to search the right product, which leads to more utilization of device resources like memory and computational power. In addition, the users are striked with more information which is not significant. Therefore, there is a need to design applications, which identify the customer requirements by acquiring the context information from distinct sources and thereby providing timely and specific information or services to the customer. Hence, to adapt services based on various situations, it is required to develop a systematic approach for representation and utilization of context information modified to special characteristics of mobile commerce applications. The mobile commerce environment uses C-IOB model for analyzing the relevant context information of customers and the context based beliefs helps to identify a suitable service for an end customer, thereby reducing mobile transaction execution time and providing customer benefits. The simulation environment consists of 10,000 electronic products which are categorized based on technical and commercial features. The simulation is carried out with ten mobile commerce transactions, the database consists of information about500 customers and 100vendors who deal with electronic products selling and10bankersfor money transactions. The customer context information is acquired from physical, system, application and social environment. When customers ends are quest for a service, the current context information is acquired, a set of observations is formulated and belief is deduced. The customer is provided with relevant information or service based on deduced belief. The simulation exhaustively tests the working of the system for mobile commerce transactions under different context environments. Some of the case studies are designed by applying the C-IOB model which includes placing the purchase order for the product, money transfer and after sales service. In summary, we have developed a context-aware system by using C-IOB model and also the design of commercial business model. To evaluate the performance of the system, we have incorporated context-awareness aspect for 10 business transactions applied to mobile commerce. The proposed system using C-IOB model provides customer required services as accurately as possible. The system has the capability to adapt to real time situation of customer needs, thereby enhancing the customer satisfaction. The simulation results have shown that the time to execute mobile commerce transactions is less using context based beliefs compared to context unaware approach. The accuracy of the system with belief based approach is higher than without context information. The customer benefits in business transaction are also enhanced by our design approach.

Nors Lietuvoje mobilioji komercija yra kylančioje savo vystymosi bangoje, daugelis įmonių ir vartotojų vis dar skeptiškai į ją žiūri, o jos potencialios galimybės daugelyje rinkų vis dar nėra išanalizuotos. Todėl šio darbo tikslas – atlikti teorinę m. komercijos pripažinimą įtakojančių veiksnių analizę, parengti šių veiksnių struktūrinį modelį ir jį empiriškai patikrinti. Iki šiol nėra mokslinės literatūros šaltinių, išsamiai nagrinėjančių mobiliosios komercijos tematiką lietuvių kalba. Šiame darbe yra išnagrinėta m. komercijos samprata bei savybės. Susisteminti mokslinėje literatūroje pateikiami m. komercijos pripažinimą lemiantys veiksniai. Darbą sudaro dvi dalys. Pirmoje dalyje yra atliekama teorinė analizė: remiantis moksline literatūra, nagrinėjama m. komercijos samprata ir pritaikymo būdai, išskiriami ir sisteminami m. komercijos pripažinimą įtakojantys veiksniai. Antroje dalyje atliekamas empirinis m. komercijos pripažinimą įtakojančių veiksnių tyrimas. Nagrinėjami technologiniai bei etikos veiksniai, lemiantys Lietuvos rinkos mobiliųjų telefonų vartotojų norą ir ketinimus naudotis m. komercijos paslaugomis. Remiantis moksline literatūra sudarytas m. komercijos pripažinimą lemiančių veiksnių struktūrinis modelis buvo sėkmingai patikrintas empirinio tyrimo būdu. Respondentų požiūriu svarbiausi m. komercijos pripažinimą įtakojantys veiksniai yra: mobilaus interneto kaina; naudojimosi mobiliosiomis paslaugomis paprastumas; m. komercijos teikiama nauda; saugumo ir... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Although m-commerce is evolving rapidly in Lithuania, many companies and consumers are still skeptical of m-commerce, and it‘s potential is still unanalyzed in many markets. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to carry out the theoretical analysis on factors influencing the adoption of m. commerce and to propose and empirically verify the structural model of these factors. There is still no scientific literature exhaustively analising the topic of m-commerce in Lithuanian. Therefore, the concept and features of mobile commerce have been examined in this work. On the basis of scientific literature, factors influencing the adoption of m-commerce have been systematyzed. The first part of this thesis is based on the theoretical analysis of various scientific sources. It analyses the concept of m-commerce, overlooks the business models and applications of m-commerce and finally – explores and systematizes factors affecting the adoption of m. commerce. The second part is based on the empirical analysis of data collected from a survey of mobile phone users. It explores technological and ethical factors influencing the potential users desires and intention to use m. commerce services. The proposed structural model of the factors affecting the adoption of m-commerce was succesfully verified by empirical research. In the respondents point of view the main factors influencing the adoption of m-commerce are: price of mobile internet, ease of use, benefis of m-commerce, security and... [to full text]