Ah, another screw up by the “tax authorities” in continuing to depend on “ncs, avandae, microsoft” for building their mytax.iras.gov.sg site. It has thus far not allowed me to file. Clever use of broken stuff from microsoft.
Ah, another screw up by the “tax authorities” in continuing to depend on “ncs, avandae, microsoft” for building their mytax.iras.gov.sg site. It has thus far not allowed me to file. Clever use of broken stuff from microsoft.
It might not be their fault
You weren’t trying to use one of them unapproved “open-sores” type operating systems or browsers now, were you?
If not, there’s always the phone-in method.
Re: It might not be their fault
Funny that you should say that it is not their fault. The Windows infrastructure DOES NOT SCALE. Their site said: “We are experiencing heavy traffic. Please retry after two hours.”
Earlier this morning, April 15, I filed two submissions, one via Fedora 8 and the other via Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and it went through finally. The site can certainly use better fonts – but I am sure it look swell on a broken OS and broken browser. The fact that not only do I have to pay tax to the tax man, but I think the cleverer deal is the Broken OS tax by Microsoft on the tax man. So, although I have no MS product to do everything I need, the one place that I have to engage with, the IRAS, is beholden to MS.
Don’t get me wrong here. I think the IRAS site has improved leaps and bounds from three years ago. At least this time (as was last year and I think 2006) after logging in, you are presented one page with everything. That is a far, far cleverer way to do this than the 2005 method, so from a process flow, they have improved significantly. What annoys me is how they moved from a Solaris/Apache solution to a Windows/IIS for the front end. It is a pity, really. They could have moved to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Apache solution though. In all those early years, I *never* had a problem filing my taxes. The failures happened when the tax man got conned to switch to Windows and 2008 was no different.
In any case, the MS Singapore people have had a lot of their KPIs met this year. So, good for them. They bought themselves the OOXML vote globally and have also bagged the SOEsilly deal – through more conning of the consortia and customer. Do we need to let them milk this country of mine again and again and again?
These two videos are an example of how bad the site responds. The first one:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5GGkGD7DsY&hl=en]
shows how I choose to go to login via SingPass and how much time it took me to get there.
The second video is after logging into SingPass, to return to the IRAS portal. Again, the response of the system is pathetic for a mission critical service (unless, of course, IRAS deems it NOT to be mission critical).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8zt1yvXgYs&hl=en]