E-tax Annoyances!

Every year E-tax offers a month of annoyances for the poor IT staff who have to install it. Each year brings new and unique quirks that belong only to that year's build of E-tax. Nobody (even E-tax's programmers) knows what those quirks will be until E-tax is released into the wild.

One year the icons malfunctioned. Another year patrons couldn't upload their tax returns until they'd updated the program. But they didn't discover this until after they'd filled everything out. And if they'd forgotten to save their file? Well, bad luck.

This year's quirk (so far):

Our dutiful IT staff downloaded E-tax on 1 July and installed it faithfully on the public machines. A preliminary functionality test said everything was okay.

But then today, when a patron attempted to use E-tax, it wanted updating.

So, our intrepid IT staff go to update the program, only to have E-tax crash every single time. Joy.

Having no idea what was going on, the IT geeks downloaded E-tax one more time and reinstalled the sucker.

This time, things worked.

However...

One thing they noticed was that the release date of 'Old' Etax2011 was 8 June 2011. But the 'New' Etax2011 was release date 24 June 2011.

For shame, ATO! Please tell us the 8 June version of Etax2011 released into the wild was an accident. And another thing we'd appreciate is version release information, including update release information available on the ATO web site so we can figure out these things the easy way and not the hard way.

IT staff have better things to do than wonder why Etax ain't working. We install it, maybe update it, and that's about it.

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SO...

1. If you're having problems with Etax2011, check that your release date is at least 24 June. Any earlier, and you're best downloading and reinstalling.

2. Public libraries are happy to offer Etax for the benefit of their patrons. HOWEVER...

3. They only provide access to the program. They can't actually do any support or troubleshooting. The ATO is more than happy to do that for you.


We wish you well in doing your taxes.