Last Minute Mentality

As usual, we Malaysian always have this kind of last minute mentality when it comes to the point of doing something. We have all been given a long sufficient time to file in our income tax either through e-filling or manual paper filing but still, we are hearing people rushing for today's dateline to submit our tax declaration for the year 2008.

For the past few days, the LHDN server had been jammed with requests and transactions and during the night time especially from 8-11pm, I was told that you couldn't even load up a page properly. Lucky for me, I have already filled up all the details well before the dateline and few days ago, I just log in to double confirm everything and submitted my tax declaration for 2008. Kao tim!

From The Star today:

PETALING JAYA: For the second year in a row, taxpayers filing their tax returns online at the last minute have caused the Inland Revenue Board’s (IRB) computer servers to jam up.

On a normal day, filing the returns online would only take a couple of minutes but the process took hours in the last few days as today’s deadline approached.

IRB has acknowledged the problem, and advised that the best time to access the e-Filing system is between 1am and 7am.

Last year, the servers were also jammed up in the last few days before the April 30 deadline.

About 1.2 million people – almost half of the 2.5 million taxpayers in the country – used the e-Filing system last year.

When the system was first introduced in 2006, only 187,000 taxpayers responded to online filing of taxes. The number grew by more than 350% in 2007, with 876,000 e-filers.

So please, if you do not want to get into trouble of getting penalty for late submission, please do it early well before the dateline. It only takes a few minutes when you do it earlier compared to few hours when you do it on the last few days. Stop the last minute mentality and practises. If there are free food or free gift in some kind of exhibitions, I'm sure we will see a totally opposite behaviors from Malaysians...Haha...