Development of a Local Government Revenue Collection Application for Nasarawa State

Inefficient manual revenue collection in local government areas of Nasarawa State creates bottlenecks, revenue leakage, and limited audit trails, undermining fiscal management capacity at the grassroots level. This study presents the development of a mobile-enabled revenue collection application for selected local government councils in Nasarawa State, North Central Nigeria. The application was built using React Native for cross-platform mobile deployment, with a Node.js and MongoDB backend. Revenue officers in the field use the app to generate receipts, record payment details, and synchronise transactions with the central server when connectivity is available, using an offline-first architecture. System development followed the Scrum methodology across six two-week sprints, with five field revenue officers involved as end-user testers throughout. Functional testing using equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis verified correct operation across 150 test cases. The system was piloted in Lafia LGA over 60 days, during which 3,200 transactions were processed. Post-pilot analysis indicated a 34 percent increase in recorded revenue compared to the same period in the preceding year, attributed to improved tracking and reduced revenue leakage. Adoption was supported by a two-day training programme for revenue officers. The study concludes that digital revenue collection solutions adapted to low-connectivity environments can significantly strengthen local government fiscal management in North Central Nigeria.

Keywords: revenue collection, local government, Nasarawa State, mobile application, offline-first architecture