eF-iling 2008

Every year for the past few years now we've had headaches come the end of April. Well actually the headache starts sometime in February, but it's the kind that you can put off till April and so we did that.

Now we've got another 6 more days till income tax submission. And as far as we know, all our necessary documentations are at hand - all we need to do is just fill in the blanks.

Filling in the income tax forms, while it looks like a straightforward process, always stump us by being somewhat different every year. The first time we've gotten our EA Form, we just thought it to be just one of them statements your company gives you stating your earnings - and so we just dump it into our workbag to get lost with the rest of the trash papers that goes in and never comes out of that bag.

Then when we were asked whether we've done our income tax baru we learn what that form was for. Thankfully that EA form hadn't disintegrated to shreds yet. Printed out the English version to read and refer to, and the BM version to fill up for submission, but even then we couldn't make out head or tails what really goes where, or why are we leaving so many columns empty. So we had Randall help us fill up and calculate our first income tax submission.

The following year, even better. Instead of the simpler BE Form, we downloaded the B Form which had loads more pages and sections - all that we needn't bother with. Didn't realize what was wrong and we wondered why that year the income tax form got more complicated.

Last year we started e-Filing, and it turned out to be a relatively painless process as we finally did not need to calculate everything ourselves but just dump the numbers in the relevant columns. Only now the forms all look foreign again to us and we still needed some time getting used to filling it up.

And with income tax, we normally just get over it and forget about it until the following year. With e-Filing this year we ran into a few more bumps. Firstly we forgot our password. It wouldn't be so much an issue except that we only had three attempts to get the password right (and we didn't want to know what happens if we get it wrong - heaven forbid they lock us out of e-Filing and we had to do a manual submission).

So we called them up. Waited for an operator to attend to us some 15 minutes later and stated our predicament, and was totally embarrassed when she told us to look for a 'Forgot Your Password' link. Years of surfing online and we never thought to look for that. Just did not know where to hide our face. But later on we found it was a good thing that we did call, as we couldn't remember what was our confirmation question / answer as well.

When it came to filling up the form we almost felt lost again, but thankfully we'd last year's submission to refer to. Would have submitted it today itself except that there were two hiccups. Firstly there is a RM1000 exemptions on books - and when we tried typing in '1000' a popup informed us to keep the receipts handy for inspection. Well we can't be too sure if we have spent more than RM1000 on books, and even if we did we had to start digging all the books for the receipts.

Second, this is the first time we have to pay tax. We were more indignant about that and so we aren't submitting yet till we worked out if we'd mis-filled a column somewhere. And we're gonna look to claiming more - hmmm, is our iPod Touch counted to claim for personal computer? We can claim up to RM3k for that. Well, actually we would have worked on it today but taking a look again at the main page we decided over that today probably isn't meant to be a good day for income tax.

Deadlines: 6 days for BE Form, 66 days for B Form.