Earlier this week "Do Not Reply" let me know, in an email titled "Return Available", that it was time to file my company GST return:
You have GST returns for period ending 30 September 2017, due
30 October 2017, now available for filing for the following IRD numbers:
So this weekend I finished up the data entry and calculated the data needed to file the GST return, as usual. (Dear IRD, if you are listening, perhaps "Do Not Reply" is not the most optimal sender for official correspondence? Maybe you could consider, eg, "IRD Notification Service"? Also "Return Available" seems like a confusing way to say "please file your GST return this month". Just saying.)
Of note for understanding what transpires below, I was forced to register for "MyIR" a couple of years ago to request IRD provide a Tax Residency Certificate; other countries have information, but IRD only provide a guide to determining tax residency, and needed the concept of a Tax Residency Certificate explained to them, including the fields required by their Double Taxation Treaty partners.
Because of that "MyIR" registration, I am now forced to file GST returns online (once you have registered, filing on paper is no longer an option). Previously the online filing has been relatively simple, but this weekend while the filing went okay, trying to exit out of the "MyGST" part of the "MyIR" website of the Inland Revenue Department turned into a comedy of errors:
The "Log Off" button in the "MyGST" site, something you would hope would be regularly tested, failed to work. It tries to access (via Javascript obscurity):
https://services.ird.govt.nz/myirlogout.jspwhich seems a plausible enough URL, but actually ends up with:
Secure Connection Failed The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.every time I tried. (The "Logout" link on the "MyIR" site, also loading via Javascript, went to a different
ird.govt.nzsite, but did actually work; it is unclear if logging out of "MyIR" also logs you out of "MyGST", as they are presented as separate websites.)Since a working "Log Off" function seemed important to a site that holds sensitive, potentially confidental, information I tried to report the issue. Conveniently the "MyGST" site has a handy "Send us a message" link on its front page, so I attempted to use that. However I found:
It will not accept ".txt" attachments (to illustrate the problem): "
File Type .txt is not allowed" with no indication of why it is not allowed. (I assume "not on the whitelist", but that raises the questions (a) why?! and (b) what "File Type"s are allowed. Experimentally I determined that PNG and PDF were allowed.)There is no option to contact about the website, only "something else".
When you "Submit" the message you've written, the website simply returns to the "MyGST" home page with no indication whether or not the message was sent, where you might see the sent message, and no copy of the sent message emailed to you. (I tried twice; same result both times.)
So that did not seem very promising.
For the record, I eventually found -- much later -- that you can check if the message has been sent by:
Going to the "Activity Centre" tab of "MyGST"
Clicking on the "More..." button next to the "Messages" heading
Clicking on the "Outbox" tab of that mailbox
and you will see your messages there, and can click on each one to view them. (Which showed that each of my two attempts had apparently been sent twice, despite the website not informing me it had done so; oops. It is unclear to me how they ended up each being sent twice; I did not, eg, click through a "resend POST data" dialogue.)
When it was unclear if "Send us a message" in "MyGST" worked, I thought the next best option would be to go back to the "MyIR" site, and use "Secure mail" which is IRD's preferred means of contact (as I found out when, eg, trying to get a Tax Residency Certificate a couple of years ago). Unfortunately when I attempted to use that I found:
There is no option to choose "Website" or "GST" from the form at all, so I had to send an "All Other" / "All Other" message;
There was no option to add attachments to the message, so I could not include the screenshots/error output; and
When I submitted that message, I got a generic 404 error!
https://www1.e-services.ird.govt.nz/error/error404.htmlwhich told me:
Contact us Page not available The page you are trying to access is not available on our website. If you have reached this page by following a link on our website rather than using a bookmark, please take a moment to e-mail the General comments form with the details of the page you were trying to access.
The "MyIR" "Secure Mail" feature does have an obvious "Sent" tab, so in another window I was quickly able to check that it had not in fact been sent. At this point I assumed I was 0 for 3 -- not a great batting average.
Still, the
404page did offer a link to the General Comments page:https://www.ird.govt.nz/cgi-bin/form.cgi?form=comments
so it seemed worth reporting the accumulating list of problems. That "General Comments" page is (naturally) very general, but:
"Website" is not a category they have anticipated receiving comments about (so "Other" it is again); and
Your choices for response are:
No response required
In writing by mail
Over the phone
In writing by fax
And that is it: no option to ask for a response by email. But if your 1990s fax machine is still hooked up and working then IRD is ready to respond to your online communication with your preferred option! (It appears based on your response here the second stage of the form requires you to enter different values; but the "In writing by mail" does not even collect a postcode!)
In fairness, the second stage of the form also allowed an optional email address to be entered -- which I did -- so possibly they might treat one of the above as "by email"; it is just not at all obvious to the user.
The box for entering comments was 40 characters wide by 4 characters deep -- there are programmable calculators with a larger display! (In fairness Firefox on OS X at least does allow resizing this; but nothing says "we hope you do not have much to say" like allowing a old-Tweet length worth of text to be visible on the screen at once.)
Anyway undeterred by all of this I reported in brief, the three problems I had encountered so far: (1) "MyGST" Log Off function broken; (2) "MyGST" "Send us a message" function apparently not working; (3) "MyIR" "Secure Mail" sending resulting in a 404.
That one was successful, giving me a "comment sent" confirmation page, although without any tracking number or other identifier (the closest to an identifier is "Your request was sent on Sunday 8 October 2017 at 14:40"). Sadly my neatly laid out bullet point list of issues encountered was turned into a single line of terribly formatted run on text; it appears they were serious about people keeping their comments to old-Tweet length!
After this experience I was surprised to find that the only working thing -- the General Comments Form -- offered me a chance to:
Send feedback about this form
Since I seemed to be on a yak shaving mission to use every feedback form on the site, who could resist?! I (successfully!) offered them anonymous feedback that:
In 2017, offering "response by email" might be a useful update;
Perhaps "In writing by fax" could be retired;
40x4 character comment forms are... rather small and difficult to use.
Only I had to do so much more tersely because the "Online Form Feedback" comment field was itself 40x4 characters.
On the plus side:
I did manage to file my GST return
Eventually if one is patient enough, one does get auto-logged out of the "MyIR" site, so maybe one does get auto-logged out of the "MyGST" site as well;
Apparently I did manage to report the original "MyGST" "Log Off" problem after all (and hopefully someone at IRD can merge those into a single ticket, rather than having four people investigating the problem).
Now to actually pay my GST amount due.
If IRD do respond with anything useful I will add an update to this post to record that, eg, some of the above issues have been fixed. At least two of them ("MyGST" "Log Off" isue and "MyIR" "Secure Mail" sending seem likely to be encountered by other users and fixed.)
ETA 2017-10-17: IRD responded to my second contact attempt (in MyGST) with:
"""Good Afternoon Ewen.
Thank you for your email on the 8th October 2017.
seeing you are having issues with the online service please
contact us on 0800 227 770.
As this service doesn't deal with these issues, This service
is for web message responses for GST accounts. We have forwarded
this message to be directed to our Technical Services as this
is a case for them."""
which, at one week to reply, is much better than their estimated reply time. I have assumed that "forwarded [...] to our Technical Services [...]" will be sufficient to get the original reports in front of someone who might be able to actually investigate/fix them, and not done anything further (calling an 0800 number for (frontline) "technical support" seems unlikely to end well over such a technical issue).
The "MyGST" "Log Off" functionality is still broken though. The "MyIR" logout functionality is slow, but does eventually work.
However going back to an earlier GST page after using the "MyIR" log out functionality, and reloading still shows I am in my "MyGST" account", and can access pages in "MyGST" that I previously had not viewed in this session. So it appears the two logoff functions are separate -- even though they are controlled by a single "logon" screen. By contrast, trying to go to a "MyIR" page does correctly show the login screen again.
So we learn that logging off "MyGST" separately is important, and that it is still broken (at least in Firefox 52 LTS on OS X 10.11, and Safari 11 on OS X 10.11; both retested today, 2017-07-17).