BIR Woes and Frustrations

BIR Woes and Frustrations

This is again the time of the year for filing income tax returns. Though I have not really filed anything since I am but an employee, and that before I have no direct conversation with our accounting department when it comes to BIR fillings, this year is a little bit different.

As the senior systems administrator for a medium sized business, I was involved with our accounting departments preparation for BIR's so-called On-line Filing of Income Tax Returns, among other things.  And since February, I believed that we are prepared for such on-line filing. However, it turned out that we are not really that prepared.

I made sure that all our systems are up-to-date, and that all firewall and policies has been reviewed to make sure that there will be no issues with connecting to BIR's servers.  But all this preparation were doomed to fail right from the start.  I must admit, BIR never gave any seminar about the things to expect about this new system.  And our accounting manager knows little about the said system, even when we called BIR for assistance.

Then we were told that their website, and on-line process is only compatible with Internet Explorer 9.  With that, I needed to downgrade the internet explorer version in two of our accounting departments computer from version 11 to version 9.  In the first place, who in their right mind would still want to use internet explorer 9?

Another program that BIR provided, the eBIR Forms Package v7 has been a little bit faulty. Again, I have tried this out with my computer, on a laptop, and even tried with a fresh installation of Windows 7 Service Pack 1.  And so far, it would normally crash the msha service 5 our of 6 times.  I haven't tried it on Windows XP Service Pack 3 since I do not have any installer for that version of Windows, nor did I have a chance to get my hands on the very first installer of Windows 7.

But then again, BIR should have tested this out fully before implementing such system. I am not really sure if we are the only ones experiencing an issue with their so called on-line filing, but my instincts tell me that others are also pulling their hairs out out of frustration.

DISCLAIMER:
I do not claim that I am an expert, nor do I claim that I know exactly what is going on. These are only my personal opinion, which are based on my personal experience.  I have not made a proper investigation on the matter, and nor do I have evidence to claim that BIR has not done anything to make this work. This is solely based on what I am experiencing and I am only ranting my distaste and disappointment with the current way BIR has implemented the new on-line system.