In this article, we present the explicit expressions for the higher-order moments and cumulants of the first-order random coefficient integer-valued autoregressive (RCINAR(1)) process. The spectral and bispectral density functions are also obtained, which can characterize the RCINAR(1) process in the frequency domain. We use a frequency domain approach which is named Whittle criterion to estimate the parameters of the process. We propose a test statistic which is based on the frequency domain approach for the hypothesis test, H 0 : α = 0 ←→ H 1 : 0 < α < 1, where α is the mean of the random coefficient in the process. The asymptotic distribution of the test statistic is obtained. We compare the proposed test statistic with other statistics that can test serial dependence in time series of count via a typically numerical simulation, which indicates that our proposed test statistic has a good power.