Income tax blues

Four or five years ago, I always dreaded the prospect of submitting my annual income tax returns. I'd get nightmares thinking about it -- the traffic jam along the roads leading to the Inland Revenue Department building, the difficulty in finding a place to park the car, circling the building like a hawk and then often having to park far away, walking shoulder to shoulder with people, finding that the boxes which the department had conveniently left outside the door were filled to the brim with tax payers' returns, suddenly finding a drive-in lane that I had missed, etc. Stressful!!

Friends and colleagues have been extolling to me the virtues of e-filing. Everything can be done through the Internet. It's just the press of a button and the income tax returns are submitted electronically and instantly. I should try it, they tell me, and forego the old dinosaur way.

Maybe I should but somehow, I find it greatly inconvenient to go the e-filing way. What if the system were to crash halfway through my e-fling? Would I lose all my data? I've got a million and one unanswered questions. Moreover, in more recent years, it had become quite easy going to the IRD. Less stress. The roads are clear, there is ample place to park right outside the building, no jostling with people going up or down the stairs, the ease of just throwing the return into the near-empty box which is now placed inside the building. Therefore, yes sirree, I think I shall stick to my time-tested manual method of tax submissions in the foreseeable future.

Yesterday, I read in the newspapers that the number of people choosing e-filing had gone up by 30 percent this year, touching 1.25 million tax payers. In 2006, there were about 79,000 e-filing tax payers, and the number increased to 539,000 tax payers in 2007 and 881,000 tax payers in 2008.

Well and good that the number of e-filing tax payers has increased. It will benefit the people who DO NOT use e-filing, people like me. And then just last week, my colleagues were commenting that it was becoming very difficult for them to submit their returns electronically. Number One complaint: the e-filing system was congested and unresponsive. One colleague had actually sat at his computer for several hours before he could submit successfully .... at 3am! If this is not stress, I don't know what is.

So let me repeat my assertion: no sirree, I have no wish to get caught in another tax submission trafic jam, even though the traffic jam is now electronic. I shall not sit at the computer at 3am in the morning for such a meaningless task. I shall stick to manual calculations for the time being until the IRD can get their electronic act together. Definitely, it's less stressful for me!