Quality Assurance for Secure Digital Banking and Electronic Tax Filing Platforms

Abstract

Purpose: Digital banking and electronic tax filing share a failure profile in which one duplicated posting, one exploitable
interface or one outage in the final filing hours turns a software defect into financial loss, regulatory breach or lost taxpayer
trust. This review asks how quality assurance can produce defensible evidence across transaction integrity, security
verification, compliance, deadline resilience and audit trails. Method: A critical integrative review of software testing,
security engineering, traceability, payments compliance and tax-compliance research was conducted under a documented
search, screening and appraisal protocol, and findings were synthesised through claim, argument and evidence reasoning.
Findings: Functional pass rates say little about duplicate postings under retry; scanner output is dominated by false alarms
unless triaged for exploitability; compliance artefacts often certify control design rather than operation; and filing platforms
fail at the queueing knee, not at average load. Contribution: The article proposes the FISCAL Assurance Chain: six evidence
constructs tied to a non-compensatory release gate, formal indicators including duplicate-effect rate, triaged vulnerability
density, headroom ratio and audit-trail completeness, and seven falsifiable propositions with stated tests. Implications: Banks
and tax authorities should gate releases on operating evidence, test retries and deadline surges explicitly, and treat audit trails
as tested products. The propositions are untested and call for prospective validation.