Purpose
This study examines the effects of Tax Awareness, Technological Factors, and Trust in Government on Taxpayer Compliance among individual business taxpayers in Gorontalo Province, Indonesia, and investigates whether Balata Yipilo Cultural Values moderate these relationships within a local cultural setting.

Design/methodology/approach
A quantitative design with SEM-PLS (SmartPLS 4.1.1.1) is employed using Likert-scale questionnaire data from 202 individual business taxpayers (MSMEs). The measurement and structural models are assessed using standard PLS-SEM criteria (reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, VIF, and SRMR), and hypotheses are tested through bootstrapping.

Findings
The model is adequate: all constructs are reliable and valid, free from harmful collinearity, with a moderate-strong explanatory power for Compliance (R² ≈ 0.53). Tax Awareness and Technological Factors have positive and significant effects on Taxpayer Compliance, whereas Trust in Government is not significant. All interactions between Balata Yipilo and the three independent variables fail to support the moderation hypotheses; one interaction is statistically significant but carries a negative coefficient and is therefore also rejected. These results indicate that compliance is primarily driven by taxpayers’ awareness and the supportiveness of tax-related technology, while Trust in Government and Balata Yipilo operate more as normative and institutional background conditions than as statistical amplifiers of the observed relationships.

Research limitations/implications

The study is limited to business taxpayers in a single province, uses a cross-sectional design, and relies on self-reported perceptions, so generalization should be made cautiously. Practically, tax authorities and local governments should prioritize programs that enhance tax awareness, improve the reliability and usability of tax technology systems, and build public trust, while integrating Balata Yipilo values into tax education and services as an ethical and cultural foundation for compliance.

Originality/value
This research provides recent empirical evidence on tax compliance among business taxpayers in a culturally distinctive region, combining psychological, technological, governmental trust, and cultural factors within a single SEM-PLS framework. It enriches context-sensitive tax compliance theory and offers guidance for culturally responsive tax policy design