Online Tax Filing System (SE Project)

Problem

Manual tax filing is error-prone and hard to audit, and most students never get to practice the full software-engineering lifecycle on a system with real stakeholders and rules. This project tackled both: design an online tax filing system end to end, with proper engineering rigor rather than just code.

Approach

A team software-engineering project that walked the complete SDLC for a tax filing system with three actors — taxpayers, tax authorities, and an admin:

• Requirements engineering: elicited and documented functional requirements per role — registration/approval, TIN login, receipt submission, automated tax calculation, multi-method payment, notifications, and an authority validation/reporting workflow.
• Feasibility study: assessed technical, operational, and economic feasibility.
• System design: modeled the system with UML, defined core components (central database, API, taxpayer and authority applications), and specified the automated calculation rules (credits, exemptions, deductions) and KPIs.

Results

• A complete requirements and design specification spanning all three user roles.
• UML models and a component architecture (DB + API + multi-platform clients) ready to implement.
• A defined KPI set (collection, compliance rate, audit coverage, tax gap) for measuring success.

Learnings

• Rigorous requirements work up front prevents expensive rework later.
• Modeling the system before coding exposes role/permission edge cases early.
• This project laid the conceptual groundwork later carried into the Gibirx platform.