This paper provides an initial exploration of the relationship between electronic service delivery and public accountability. Specifically, it investigates public accountability for the implementation of electronic local government. Based on empirical research with council officers and elected members, it proposes a initial evaluation framework for local e‑Government accountability. It examines the practice of e‑Government accountability using this framework.

This paper explores three main areas, firstly, website accessibility guidelines; secondly, website accessibility tools and finally the implication of human factors in the process of implementing successful e‑Government websites. It investigates the issues that make a website accessible and explores the importance placed on web usability and accessibility with respect to e‑Government websites. It briefly examines accessibility guidelines, evaluation methods and analysis tools. It then evaluates the web accessibility of e‑Government websites of Saudi Arabia and Oman by adapting the 'W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines'. Finally, it presents recommendations for improvement of e‑Government website accessibility.

New systems can be designed by composing them out‑of‑existing software components which are accessible as web services and provided by the service providers. Governmental organizations can act as service providers by providing information or functionality like authenticating. The basic premise is that by reusing components, development and maintenance costs can be lowered and flexibility is created. As such, public agencies are looking for support to create new compositions. Several composition approaches can be found in the literature, however none of these evaluations take into account the e‑government specific requirements originating from the involvement of multiple parties having different interests. In this paper we present a composition evaluation approach which extends the existing evaluation approaches by including the multi‑actor dimension. We illustrate this method using an example. Further research is aimed at executing the proposed approach and comparing semantic and multi‑actor‑based compositions methods.

As ICT provide a lot of possibilities, high expectancies exist towards the electronic public service provision. All governments are increasingly establishing their e‑strategies. However, eGovernment still faces many challenges as it continues to develop. The current status of electronic services delivery opens up a lot of questions, both for practitioners and researchers. Therefore, further progress of eGovernment needs a profound knowledge base. eGovernment policy has focused several years on bringing online public services and on benchmarking their availability and sophistication. Simultaneously, eGovernment measurement and monitoring activities are often based on the so‑called supply‑side benchmarking. Although this is important knowledge, it is under criticism because it lacks a user‑centric viewpoint of eGovernment development. This article presents and discusses a bottom‑up and data‑driven approach about how research can help to manage (user‑centric) eGovernment strategies. Based on statistical testing (techniques of structural equation modeling, SEM) of large‑scale sample data from the Belgian government, the authors have investigated which relations do exist between contextual variables and the availability and/or satisfaction of electronic public services. By doing this, this manuscript presents an illustration of a data‑driven approach in eGovernment monitoring and it explains how this can support and enrich the management and evaluation of eGovernment policy.

This paper seeks to identify the effects of Internet used as a vehicle for sending federal tax returns through the RECEITANET program. The benefits that came out from security and costs reduction in the process of delivering tax returns are identified, as well as the impacts on Tax Administration (TA) and on the Treasury‑Taxpayer relationship.

We define and elaborate a Social Value framework supporting evaluation and attainment of the broader socio‑political and socio‑economic goals that characterise many electronic government initiatives. The key elements of the framework are the willingness of citizens to (positively) recommend an e‑Government service to others, based upon personal trust in the service provider, and personal experience of the service, based upon experience of service provision and outcomes. The validity of the framework is explored through an empirical quantitative study of citizens' experiences of a newly introduced e‑Government system to allocate public social housing. The results of this study include evidence of generic antecedents of trust and willingness to recommend, pointing the way to more general applicability of the framework for designers and managers of electronic government systems.