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

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

Nikolay Elenkov writes:

 > There is a simple workaround: install your mynumber certificate on
 > your phone.  [...]  You can use the Web UI and use a QR code to
 > login, submit, and authenticate when needed.

Unfortunately for some purposes I need to use the native e-Tax
software, which only exists on Windows.  I will check to see if login
via QR code is suppored there.

 > 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.
 >