IRD hasn’t sent me anything for years already. Oh well, I did receive it once years back but since I was still in uni and so used my tuition fee as allowance, eventually IRD had to refund the tax I paid. Ever since then, IRD never sent me anything again – I’m what they call “Taxpayer previously assessed as not liable to tax” – no tax return whatsoever.

This year, my visible income finally reaches the bar and I am honest enough to think about “tax”. So, I tried to do it online (hate printing stuffs and sending things) then… stuck! Safari, of course, isn’t supported – that’s not a question at all. Alright, go Firefox. Still… it keeps giving me error message.

I was running Firefox 3, which IRD website claims supported. So, what’s the error about? Oh, JVM is not enabled. Wait? JVM is basically included in OS X. As long as I run Software Updates on my Mac, I should have the latest JVM installed on my Mac. (Though installing all software updates may cause other problems… but that’s another story.) So, what’s going on?

I googled it and found that I’m not the only one but the question seems to be unsolved. There is this guy who wrote about using e-tax on his blog and he used it on mac with Firefox 2. So… Let’s give it a try. Googled for Firefox 2 and Mozilla is still offering it on their site for download. Downloaded it, installed it, run it.

Voila! There we go. This time the site runs smoothly. The log-in page is finally loaded up.

So, just really, really, DON’T TRUST THE GOVERNMENT! Though our government seems to be reacting promptly to the Type A H1N1 Flu (aka Swine Flu – and btw, who knows if they’re over-reacting but let’s just think positively), they’re still VERY SLOW in most other areas. You wanna go compatible with government stuffs, DOWNGRADE is the answer!

And downgrade is the track our chief executive’s popularity is on – a constant downgrade.