I WAS over the moon recently when I was finally able to file my tax return online for the current year. It was as if I had walked through a field of thick mud, full of traps and mind games. The completion of the process made me dizzy with joy.
For some strange reason, the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) introduces a new tax form every year. This is done reportedly to keep the tax filers sharp and mentally agile. The form tests one’s patience, intelligence and imagination to the full, making things tricky for the filers.
As soon as you log into the website, a captcha window appears. This is a normal security requirement at most websites, but this one has a sadistic touch about it: captcha has to be verified within 15 seconds, otherwise it expires and has to be refreshed. For a senior citizen like me, it takes that many seconds just to read the letters, let alone pressing allthe right keys. The rush to beat the clock makes the venture quite exciting.
Once that hurdle has finally been crossed, another surprise awaits you: the headings shown on the pages are not the places to enter data. The entries are to be made somewhere else under various headings, like final tax, adjustable tax, average tax, etc., and you have to find out the appropriate one. Detailed descriptions of banks and other withholding tax (WH T) institutions have to be filled in again because last year’s entries have not been copied to the new form.
In a major departure from last year’s return when all the possible heads of withholding tax were mentioned in the return and you simply had to fill in the figures, this time you had to first select the relevant heads yourself from the dropdown menu before entering the figures. Each head of income or expense now carries areference to aparticularsection and sub-section of Income Tax Ordinance, 1979, and only a tax expert would know how to select the right one. The dividend entry alone had almost 15 types. The sameapplied to personal expenses in the wealth reconciliation statement.
I had almost completed the return when, feeling exhausted, I exited the site to return to it a little later. When I logged in after a few hours, my heart skipped a beat or two because the sign on the screen said: ‘No record found’. All the entries I had made earlier were gone. In panic, I closed the site and logged in again.
Magically, this time the file with all the relevant entries appeared on the screen.
This happened a few more times before I was ready to submit it, or so I thought. As soon as I pressed the button, a big red window appeared, telling me: ‘You have not filled in details of your properties.
I had come across no indication in the form about the requirement. I went through the form in even more detail, and, sure enough, found that the form this year did require details, like date of purchase and covered area of the property.
I filled out the fields and hit the submit button. A big red window was there again to greet me: ‘You have not filled in the attributes.’ I did not even know the meaning of the term. I went through the whole return again looking for the word ‘attributes’, and found it in a particular section. I opened the dropdown menu and filled in the data that was required. I pressed the ‘submit’ tab again to see what happens next. To my utter surprise, the return did go through this time. Hurrah! Saeed Haider Karachi