Towards A Unified Zakat System

in the three items were insignificant, suggesting that thesmall differences in the means of the four countries are dueto chance and not to statistically significant differences.Significant differences, however, are found between theparticipants when they were asked whether they trusted theDepartment of Zakat. This can be clearly seen by thereported chi-square, which is highly significant, even atthe 1 percent level. In this respect, it is important tomention that of the four GCC countries covered in this studyonly Saudi Arabia has a Department of Zakat. For the othercountries, however, charitable organisations and Islamicbanks carry out the same tasks of the Saudi Department ofZakat, with the exeption that the payment of Zakat to themis not compulsory. Because of this similarity, thecharitable organisations and Islamic banks as a proxy to theDepartment of Zakat were used. The respondents from thethree other countries (where this adjustment applied) wereinstructed to use this proxy. An examination of the meansstrongly supports the significance of the test. Theresondents means are roughly divided into two groups.Bahrain and Kuwait have means of 4.4 and 4 respectively,while Saudi Arabia and the UAE have 3 and 3.25 respectively.Clearly, the distrust is greater in the first two countries.The striking difference is that not all-Saudi respondentsactually gave an opinion since they ticked the indifferent213