YA 2007

Fine I know, I left it a little too late, but hey its not as if I didn't even try to do it earlier. What am I talking about? Knowing citizens of Malaysia would know that its the filing of tax returns for the year of assessment 2007, the deadline of which is today, the 30th of April, for individuals without business income.

I had to get help from mum to help complete my tax return because of the sorting out parts for my insurances. I know, I'm an accountant, why the heck can't I do it myself? Well, becauseeee insurance statements and contracts are soooo confusing!

Anyways, I went down to the IRB (Inland Revenue Board) at Jalan Duta at about 10 ish am, walked in after illegally parking by the side of the road some way down the road, and was in the hope that I could finish the filing in an hour cause I have to fetch my Godsister-in-law for lunch at our friend's newly opened restaurant.

So I asked this staff at the paper filing boxes for the direction to the E-Filing Department, walked over and asked around again for the queue for first time request for Pin and promptly got in the queue. This, is where the nightmare began... the system was once again sluggish (even though the bandwidth was upped significantly from last year) and the staff were having trouble accessing the Pin issuance and reset pages, requiring refresh after refresh after refresh...

I was about 4 persons away from the front of the queue and it took me more than half an hour to just get to the front, and more than 10 minutes to finally get my Pin after getting to the front due to the system downtime and sluggishness. Thankfully, the staff were all very nice and were apparently in high spirits even though the system was technically, failing them.

My wait in the queue was made worse by the blabbing lady behind me who couldn't stop talking about her personal life, from when she last filed, to her boyfriend who's Malay and lives in Singapore (she's Chinese) and to why she wouldn't give up her Malaysian citizenship for anything in the world. Yes yes I know... I don't want to hear your life story when I'm stressed enough as it is having stood in the queue for that long woman...

Having said that, after getting my Pin and log-on details, I went ahead to file my returns at the terminals available. I got some help from a staff as it was my first time performing the E-Filing, they politely answered my questions and directed me as to how to get started. About 15 minutes later, I'm all done filling in the figures, submitted and looking for the printout of my Submission Confirmation. Great service really...

Yeah, I was amazed, that was quick huh! (Please bear in mind that I had a paper copy all properly filled in already prior to starting the process) Being the nice person that I am, I agreed to fill in a questionnaire for a research by UiTM for the IRB and hopefully I contributed to the statistics. ;-)