Compliance Theory: A Case Study Approach in Understanding Organizational Commitment

The Electronic Commerce (e-Commerce) Act of 2000 or Republic Act (RA) No. 8792 mandates all government agencies to transact business and perform government functions using electronic documents within two years from the date of its effectivity in June 2000. Unfortunately, only a handful of government agencies were ready to implement the said law in the year 2002 despite the availability of applicable information technology (IT) resources and appropriated budget. After 17 years, there is considerable improvement in the compliance with the said law, though there are still non-compliances of government offices that could not manage to be at par with leading compliant government offices. To understand the compliance behavior of an agency vis-a-vis the e-Commerce Act, I proceed in three steps. First, I adopted socio-economic theory on regulatory compliance Next, I use process pattern matching as a qualitative approach to examine the compliance variables by comparing the case-based empirical patterns with the operational framework. And third, I statistically test the hypotheses that organizational commitment and the organizational maturity on the use of IT impact the level of compliance. I do this by using case study method by combining the qualitative and quantitative analyses of the compliance behavior of the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the Commission on Elections Thus, this paper contributes to the theorization of regulatory
compliance in understanding organizational commitment with electronic commerce and related laws involving the use of IT in the Philippine context with detailed elucidation of the variables influencing it.