Better Earlier Than Last Minute Rush

04 March, 2006

Looking up the sky this morning, I saw what a pretty clear blue color up there. Does it mean the Spring is around the corner? I hope so! Unfortunately the current weather doesn't support the coming season. The temperature keeps cool in 30s and it wouldn't even make any difference in the next couple of days according to weather forecast.


In contrast with the unpredictable time limit of season change, the tax-filling deadline will be due exactly on April 15. The date falls on Saturday this year, so the tax deadline has two more days to extend untill April 17. Although the due is only 6 weeks away, we have done it yet and found no error so far. We use TaxCut software to get the tax work done easily. A new version has both federal and state tax module to make the task way easier than we had last year. Why do we want to get our taxes completed earlier? Certainly to avoid long lines at the post office.


My home-country has the same system to file individual income tax starting 4 years ago. It's called self-assessment. Too bad, it doesn't work as what expected. I would say the system does work well in my home-country only if the people are all honest to report their real income no matter they have one or two more jobs. Wait!.. not only the people who make the system work but the government plays an important role at this point. How could you encourage yourself being honest if you are allowed to pay the government people in case you report a mistake or a wrong statement and later on you get no penalty charged? No surprise to see many of them just put their income as lower as possible to avoid the tax payment. Before this new system was adopted, each employee had no obligation to file their income tax because the company (H&R dept.) did the tax work for each employee. The new system was still in progress to utilize when I was about leaving my country. Nobody was familiar with the system, no informative details about the regulation, no software to support. We were totally blind about it! A good thing is the people under H&R took over the task and just needed a sign from each of us. I don't know the progress nowadays. It could be better, it could be worse. I guess the system keeps not working because of the reason I've mentioned earlier. I hope I was wrong but who cares? I don't!