Elizabeth A. Dogbatsey
Emerging economies collect substantially less tax revenue relative to national income than advanced economies, and a large share of this shortfall reflects weak enforcement capacity rather than statutory rates. Digital audio technologies and integrated financial information systems are increasingly promoted as instruments for narrowing this gap, yet the evidence on whether, when, and how they raise compliance and transparency remains scattered across public economics, accounting, and information systems scholarship. This review synthesises empirical and conceptual work published between 2006 and 2026 to assess what is known about four interlocking mechanisms: third party information reporting and electronic invoicing, electronic filing and payment platforms, continuous auditing and analytics, and distributed ledger and regulatory technology approaches to data governance. Three consistent patterns emerge. First, technologies that create verifiable third-party information trails produce the most durable compliance gains, with value added tax self-enforcement, electronic sales registers, and consumer incentive schemes generating measurable revenue increases, while technologies that merely digitise existing processes without new information yield smaller and more fragile effects. Second, the revenue and transparency return to digital systems are conditional on administrative capacity, data quality, and political commitment rather than automatic, which explains why similar tools succeed in some jurisdictions and fail in others. Third, the accounting profession is moving from periodic sampling toward continuous assurance and population level analytics, but adoption in emerging economies lags because of skills, infrastructure, and governance constraints. These findings suggest that the design and sequencing of digital reforms matter more than the sophistication of the technology itself. The review offers tax administrators and policymakers evidence graded account of which interventions rest on strong causal evidence and which rest on weaker conceptual or cross sectional foundations, and it identifies the conditions under which digital instruments translate into sustained fiscal gains rather than symbolic modernization.