Malaysian Income Tax e-filing reviewed

Sharing some info on Income Tax e-filing.

The catchphrase is: forget the forms, better use e-filing. No more lost forms, or ink issue.

You have to go to the nearest LHDN branch to personally to get the digicert (bring your MyKad) if you choose the softcert option. When I went there last Friday afternoon, there were hardly anyone getting their certs registered. There were 2 booths open for registration. The booth I went to had about 300+ in the list. Therefore, putting the 2 lists together, there’s less than 1,000

people so far having registered. Judging by the front page news today (promoting use of e-filing), the queue will be longer now. So hurry!

But if you have a card reader (i dont think many people do), you dont need to go there at all, just “register online and download digicert into your MyKad”

Cons:

bad impression is they use Digicert’s web cert, which is of course not known to Firefox/IE (we faced same problem several years ago on the same matter) – need to install it first manually.
according to the staff, they only store current year tax info, meaning no archive of previous years’ info. But of course can make your own copy.
i would think this method is still not friendly enough for the general public. Setting up is on the complicated site, and when they start talking about “re-downloading of digicert in case of loss can only be done if backup has been done” and the need to download separate programs to “backup digicert at Digicert” & “backup to local” only makes it worse. It’s obvious that this has created a business opportunity for “experts in setting up digicert at people’s PCs.” ~~Even myself until now have not worked out how to actually digitally sign the filled-in tax form (in interactive pdf format) and send over to LHDN.~~Got it to work already – actually it puts a softcopy of the income tax form as an interactive PDF file in the Programs list, then to sign, you click on the appropriate buttons on the PDF file – it will then do everything for you.

extra comments:
So, it seems that one of the MSC’s flagship applications has done some progress i.e. store personal digicert (my softcert is valid until 2009, dunno if it will be the same in this case) onto MyKad. I think you should be able to use this to digitally sign other documents including emails.

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