Last Saturday I nipped out to have afternoon tea with nana, Julie & Chris. While we were talking, it came up that apparently I have to file a tax return. I presumed you were meant to, but since I paid all of about $88 tax in the previous financial year, on an incoming of $not-much, I figured it wasn’t worth the time – after all, it takes a good couple of hours to fill in the paperwork, locate all the crap it wants, etc. I value my time more than that. Since it was evident they owed me money if anything, I figured they wouldn’t mind me not bothering to pursue it.
Anyway, so apparently you really really really have to. Hooray. Since I can’t file online because, well, there’s no online tax filing1, there’s no way to avoid the hassle of all the paperwork. And I dumped all my paperwork at my dad’s last weekend, anyway. So I guess it’ll have to wait at least another week, regardless.
Aside from that, while perusing their website I came across this awesome gem:
Taxpayers who die while on foreign service
A taxpayer who dies while on foreign service is taken to have been engaged in that foreign service for a continuous period of 91 days if the period of service would have been at least that long but for their death.
Even in death, you can’t escape taxes. This would be even more funny if it were actually surprising. And it probably doesn’t stop there; a good medium’s quite expensive, and they charge by the hour, so the fees for filing from beyond the grave must be horrendous!
- There is this so-called “e-tax” rubbish, which they don’t support on Macs in any case, but they are happy to tell me that for a mere $449 I too can enjoy their dodgy software. And without support, too! Yeah, no, how about, go worship in your own temple. ↩︎
