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

[Nikolay Elenkov <nikolay.elenkov@example.com>]

> When trying to access some forms to set up a business, e-Tax refused
to display some critical menus because my locale was not ja_JP.

A lot of the eGov stuff breaks if not in JP locale, so just set to
Japanese and use Safari to be safe.

> I also found that it's not easy to use a cheap IC card reader (Sofun
IC609, USB A and C, 1400 with coupon on Amazon, no driver
installation required).

There is a simple workaround: install your mynumber certificate on your phone.
Then you don't need neither a reader, nor your physical card.
You can use the Web UI and use a QR code to login, submit, and
authenticate when needed.

This currently doesn't work on iPhone, but eventually (real soon now..) will.

https://www.digital.go.jp/policies/mynumber/smartphone-certification

Despite the not ideal UX, I too found eTax fairly usable, and the fact
that it automatically deals with some of the more obscure calculations
is a big plus.
You do need to figure out where to input stuff, especially if have
foreign tax credit, or a non-特定口座, etc.

On Thu, Mar 13, 2025 at 12:36 AM Stephen J. Turnbull
<turnbull@example.com> wrote:
>
> 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.