Re: [tlug] e-Tax and the timid gaijin

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

Christian Horn writes:

 > It's my 8th year in Japan.  I need to extra declare RSU/stock which
 > I get from the employer - I can compute that by now myself, but
 > still entering seems like such a hard endavour that I visit the
 > tax consult place every year.

Once I got the environment fixed up, I found filling the web forms to
not be too bad, but finding stuff it really hard (I think the NTA
hired the authors of Zork!), and the PDF and Excel forms are
gawd-awful, and butt-ugly even in Adobe on a Mac.  Not to mention the
damn popups everywhere.

 > Depending on the time of the day it takes 1-3 hours.

It's a 30-45 minute drive one way for me, so I can easily kill a day
that way.  There's also the small matter of being self-employed I can
get a 100,000 to 650,000 deduction from income, but I must do it
with e-Tax to get the big number.  If I actually make that much
(doubtful but not impossible), that's in the neighborhood of 100,000
savings on taxes.  That buys a lot of rice and beer and approval from
uchi-no-ookura-daijin, even with the insane inflation in rice prices!

 > This year, also the staff there was not able to do etax with an
 > iPhone,

Interesting.  I did the first form which I knew exactly where it was
with an iPhone.  After that the problem is that the site is hard
enough to navigate and I kept getting bounced out to public pages, and
every time I'd return to the work I'd have to log in again.  With a
Mac I could open in a new tab and preserve the logged-in tabs.

 > FWIW, application for HAM radio callsighn could be done from
 > Firefox/Linux, even though the site complained about unsupported
 > environment.

Yeah, I don't know why so many Japanese programmers have such a hard
time just conforming to open standards, but that's been true as long
as I've been here.  They'd rather conform to some BigCorp's
proprietary stuff.