e-Filing oh e-Filing

It's that time of the year again my dear friends. Heard over the news today that e-Filing is now open. I'm writing this as a friendly reminder to myself to do my taxes early this year. Last year was the first time I did e-Filing. As a true Malaysian, I did it at the very last minute. It was when so many taxpayers were complaining and screaming in the blogs/papers/radio/TV on the e-Filing website response time. I jumped on the bandwagon (filing tax late), didn't complain though as I know I was guilty for procrastinating.

I don't know whether the system has been fine-tuned or upgraded but I'd like to urge all employers to produce the EA forms early, all insurance companies to post the annual statements immediately and all taxpayers to be more responsible and file our taxes within a few weeks upon receiving the EA forms.

I know for sure that the servers hosting the e-Filing are huge, powerful servers and the system implemented costs our government millions of Ringgit (EVERY YEAR - remember... LHDN has to pay for annual maintenance of hardware, software and application). Regardless of the hardware spec and application/database architecture, the system was not performing up to taxpayers expectation last year. All I can say is that the system might be high end and sophisticated, but our decision to do e-filing on the very last minute made the system suffer.

Last year, after the e-Filing was closed there were so many people writing to the mainstream newspapers, expressing their dissatisfactions, which I didn't agree with most of them. It's not fair to blame LHDN 100% on the website's response time. How many taxpayers we have in the country? 5 million? 6 million? We are all given 1 months ++ to access the system and do our tax filing. The system (I suppose) was designed to handle heavy traffic and loads for a period of 1 month ++ every year with the assumption that there'll be random spikes throughout the period. It's a huge waste of Government's money if the system is designed to handle 12 million web-based transactions over a period of 2 hours (assumption: 6 million e-Filing X twice data entry). It would have been an overkill. The hardware alone could have cost more than 50 million Ringgit Malaysia.

So, I'd like to make a plea to all taxpayer to not put this off till the very last hour. It is something that we all can do and it's not that difficult. Don't let the Government spend more money to upgrade the system just because of our behaviour.

If we still procrastinate this year and complain about 'slow e-Filing system', I think I will propose to LHDN to have a numbering system implemented next year. That might work as it will ensure taxpayers key in their data only on the days allocated to them. In a way there'll be load distribution. But, do you think Malaysians are ready for it? Lagi tension tau.... hahaha...

Ciao baybeh.... the geeky IT engineer signs off.