The bright digital future
Pretty
soon it's the time to do our taxes for the year 2005. Here in Canada
the taxes are significantly lower than in Finland, and since prices
tend to be lower too (especially in housing, but that's perhaps another
post), even the same salary buys a lot more than it does in Finland.
And of course in a real city such as the Greater Toronto Area your
money can buy a lot that simply is not available back there.
One practical difference is that in Canada, the income taxes are paid both to the province level and the federal level, whereas in Finland, the small country not having any separate provinces, the income taxes are paid to the municipal level and the state level. Since the Canadian municipalities still have to get their money somehow, they collect property tax instead of income tax, which must be taken into consideration when comparing the overall tax rates. Both countries also have a sales tax, but in Finland all prices are expressed tax included, whereas in Canada, the cashier adds the tax to the total price. Initially this was confusing to me because I liked the Finnish convention a lot better: whatever the price tax says is what you pay, so you don't need to perform any extra calculations in your mind and get disappointed when the product was not as cheap as you thought it was.
A few years back we made the mistake of going to H&R Block to do our income taxes. Hey, perhaps they'll find some way for us to pay less which would cover the fee, and with a professional you know it's going to be right. In fact, the previous year I had used them for one task and got really good, expert service from a guy who knew what he was doing. Big mistake. The tax "expert" that handled our returns was probably first day on the job, hardly spoke any English, and was incredibly slow in everything. Many times I had to actually explain to him what something on his screen actually meant. At one point, he was scribbling something for five minutes on a piece of paper, and when we looked, we were shocked to see that he was trying to multiply two numbers there. No, I am not kidding. And it didn't get much better from there.
After two hours (for what should have been perhaps 20 minutes at most) and a bill that was over $100 we went home and immediately wrote a complaint letter to their head office. A few days later I got an apologizing phone call from somebody there, who then explained that he had looked over the papers and that the tax return was correct. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about, so I let it there.
But the relevant question in the whole tax return preparation issue is why humans need to be involved in it in the first place. Computing taxes is nothing but arithmetic with numbers done according to certain complex set of individual rules, trying to optimize the final result, so this task if anything ever should be automatically done by a computer program, eliminating the use of human brain altogether. After our ordeal, we have been using TaxWiz to do our taxes. The first time we used the system we were amazed how quickly and neatly the returns were prepared: we just filled the forms that looks like the official paper forms that we had received, and then the computer, never forgetting or overlooking anything, added things up and suggested rechecking a couple of things. In the end, the return was submitted electronically, and we soon got to enjoy our refunds. (In Finland, you have to wait for the until the end of the year, but on the other had, if you end up owing, you have time until then.)
We could now further ask whether it makes any sense to buy and install software on your machine when that software could be implemented fully on a web server, using the web browser as the universal interface. Many places are starting to advertise tax preparation services on the web, costing quite a bit less than the TaxWiz CD-ROM. But I don't think I will still ever use them. And you know why? Because of everything that I have learned so far about how services on the web tend to behave, from both my own experience and articles such as "Top 10 Reasons to Not Shop On Line". If I ever tried to use such a service, I know it would go something like this:
To get started, you must first spend half an hour filling in data about your shoe size and your godmother's maiden name, after which you get to uncheck lots and lots of checkboxes to tell them that, no thank you, you are not interested about receiving email about sailboats. At this point, you must also submit your credit card number so that they can charge the $8.95 before you get to see how the service works and perhaps not use it if you don't like what you see.
When we get to inputting the actual data, the process progresses in ironclad linear order. You must fill in every single thing on each page, and the system will not let you proceed unless you do so. Of course, when you have input something to some innocuous textfield, to "help" you the page starts reloading and the interaction freezes for a long time so that the browser can modify some other menu or input field. But not a single input field will ever contain useful help that tells you what the legal values are and where you get their values.
(In fact, I can easily count with my fingers the times I have seen a useful help system that wasn't some kind of a sick joke, especially the "index" feature. But then again, I have noticed that it is usually pointless to try to use the index of a book, since the word or term that I need to look for is never there. I bet that it would be an interesting experiment for the help systems to keep track of how many times users clicked on some term, and what terms they tried to find that weren't there, and occasionally send this data as feedback for the help system designers.)
But it doesn't matter. About halfway through, the system will stump you by requiring some information that you don't know what it even is or where to get it, and that's that about that then.
Of course the server will occasionally simply freeze under its load so that instead of the next page you were expecting, you get a timeout error message or an error page. And don't even think of pressing reload or the back button there. The whole session and the data you have put in disappears and you have to start all over again. If you are lucky, you don't have to pay another $8.95 for this priviledge.
But let's pretend that you get to the final stretch and it's time to sum up everything and prepare the return. But now what? Instead of the nicely formatted tax return shown to you and the system asking whether you want to accept and send it, there is just some weird code-looking text that contains a few numbers and occasional words. Or perhaps the page is just blank, and reloading or going back doesn't do anything at all. It's almost like the service had totally neglegted to mention that you need to use the Internet Explorer security hole to be able to use it, and the fact that FireFox does not work doesn't become evident except in the end.
Because I know even without trying that this is how every single online tax preparation service will work, I never intend to use them. The same goes for pretty much every other store in the web. You guys lost my business years ago, and will never get it back.
One practical difference is that in Canada, the income taxes are paid both to the province level and the federal level, whereas in Finland, the small country not having any separate provinces, the income taxes are paid to the municipal level and the state level. Since the Canadian municipalities still have to get their money somehow, they collect property tax instead of income tax, which must be taken into consideration when comparing the overall tax rates. Both countries also have a sales tax, but in Finland all prices are expressed tax included, whereas in Canada, the cashier adds the tax to the total price. Initially this was confusing to me because I liked the Finnish convention a lot better: whatever the price tax says is what you pay, so you don't need to perform any extra calculations in your mind and get disappointed when the product was not as cheap as you thought it was.
A few years back we made the mistake of going to H&R Block to do our income taxes. Hey, perhaps they'll find some way for us to pay less which would cover the fee, and with a professional you know it's going to be right. In fact, the previous year I had used them for one task and got really good, expert service from a guy who knew what he was doing. Big mistake. The tax "expert" that handled our returns was probably first day on the job, hardly spoke any English, and was incredibly slow in everything. Many times I had to actually explain to him what something on his screen actually meant. At one point, he was scribbling something for five minutes on a piece of paper, and when we looked, we were shocked to see that he was trying to multiply two numbers there. No, I am not kidding. And it didn't get much better from there.
After two hours (for what should have been perhaps 20 minutes at most) and a bill that was over $100 we went home and immediately wrote a complaint letter to their head office. A few days later I got an apologizing phone call from somebody there, who then explained that he had looked over the papers and that the tax return was correct. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about, so I let it there.
But the relevant question in the whole tax return preparation issue is why humans need to be involved in it in the first place. Computing taxes is nothing but arithmetic with numbers done according to certain complex set of individual rules, trying to optimize the final result, so this task if anything ever should be automatically done by a computer program, eliminating the use of human brain altogether. After our ordeal, we have been using TaxWiz to do our taxes. The first time we used the system we were amazed how quickly and neatly the returns were prepared: we just filled the forms that looks like the official paper forms that we had received, and then the computer, never forgetting or overlooking anything, added things up and suggested rechecking a couple of things. In the end, the return was submitted electronically, and we soon got to enjoy our refunds. (In Finland, you have to wait for the until the end of the year, but on the other had, if you end up owing, you have time until then.)
We could now further ask whether it makes any sense to buy and install software on your machine when that software could be implemented fully on a web server, using the web browser as the universal interface. Many places are starting to advertise tax preparation services on the web, costing quite a bit less than the TaxWiz CD-ROM. But I don't think I will still ever use them. And you know why? Because of everything that I have learned so far about how services on the web tend to behave, from both my own experience and articles such as "Top 10 Reasons to Not Shop On Line". If I ever tried to use such a service, I know it would go something like this:
To get started, you must first spend half an hour filling in data about your shoe size and your godmother's maiden name, after which you get to uncheck lots and lots of checkboxes to tell them that, no thank you, you are not interested about receiving email about sailboats. At this point, you must also submit your credit card number so that they can charge the $8.95 before you get to see how the service works and perhaps not use it if you don't like what you see.
When we get to inputting the actual data, the process progresses in ironclad linear order. You must fill in every single thing on each page, and the system will not let you proceed unless you do so. Of course, when you have input something to some innocuous textfield, to "help" you the page starts reloading and the interaction freezes for a long time so that the browser can modify some other menu or input field. But not a single input field will ever contain useful help that tells you what the legal values are and where you get their values.
(In fact, I can easily count with my fingers the times I have seen a useful help system that wasn't some kind of a sick joke, especially the "index" feature. But then again, I have noticed that it is usually pointless to try to use the index of a book, since the word or term that I need to look for is never there. I bet that it would be an interesting experiment for the help systems to keep track of how many times users clicked on some term, and what terms they tried to find that weren't there, and occasionally send this data as feedback for the help system designers.)
But it doesn't matter. About halfway through, the system will stump you by requiring some information that you don't know what it even is or where to get it, and that's that about that then.
Of course the server will occasionally simply freeze under its load so that instead of the next page you were expecting, you get a timeout error message or an error page. And don't even think of pressing reload or the back button there. The whole session and the data you have put in disappears and you have to start all over again. If you are lucky, you don't have to pay another $8.95 for this priviledge.
But let's pretend that you get to the final stretch and it's time to sum up everything and prepare the return. But now what? Instead of the nicely formatted tax return shown to you and the system asking whether you want to accept and send it, there is just some weird code-looking text that contains a few numbers and occasional words. Or perhaps the page is just blank, and reloading or going back doesn't do anything at all. It's almost like the service had totally neglegted to mention that you need to use the Internet Explorer security hole to be able to use it, and the fact that FireFox does not work doesn't become evident except in the end.
Because I know even without trying that this is how every single online tax preparation service will work, I never intend to use them. The same goes for pretty much every other store in the web. You guys lost my business years ago, and will never get it back.
In Finland With the new tax return scheme for individuals, taxpayers will have fewer forms to fill out this year:
http://www.vero.fi/default.asp?language=ENG&domain=VERO_ENGLISH
http://www.tietoyhteiskuntaohjelma.fi/etusivu/en_GB/mainpage/
Later every finnish citizen gets his own tax account:
http://www.tietoyhteiskuntaohjelma.fi/ajankohtaista/vuoden_2005_uutiset/fi_FI/1121251086159/
http://www.tietoyhteiskuntaohjelma.fi/ajankohtaista/vuoden_2005_uutiset/fi_FI/1121251086159/
Posted by Anonymous | 1:01 PM
Actually, the free (subsidized by the government) online tax application I used last year in the US was pretty well-designed, forgiving (you can close the browser, then come back at any time and start where you left off), Mozilla-compatible, and it gave you a nice PDF of your completed return. I was impressed.
Posted by Matt Brubeck | 4:41 PM