Hiccups

Today was the last day of the e-filing sessions. For the 2nd time in my 5 year volunteer history, I was present for all the sessions and this year’s sessions were plagued by problems. Apart from the usual unfriendly people that we have met by every now and then, we had PC problems, printer problems, queue cutting problems, impatient people.

But today’s problems were the most challenging one. My brother and I come across about 10 taxpayers who are not able to efile despite their income having exceeded $22,000 or net trade income is more than $6,000. In the end, I had to draft emails for all of them, to ask IRAS for an extension of time to efile their tax return. To play safe, I have also included the necessary information required by the tax department, so that extension of time can be granted without having to pay the penalty, which can be hefty in hard times like this.

I hope that these taxpayers learn from this experience and try to efile their tax return early next time. We, Singaporeans are famous for always being in the last min mode for everything, as a result, the Singpass website and IRAS website was down on Monday and Thursday as the systems could not handle the load.

Till the tax filing season next year then!!!