Annual Battle With ATO completed

The Australian Taxation Office is probably the world's most annoying purveyor of software.

OK that's a very broad statement and of course would include Microsoft in its domain so perhaps it's not quite true.

I just don't understand what goes through their IT department's collective heads.

They have this program called E-Tax which allows people to do their tax returns.

It doesn't work on some versions of Windows Vista.

It doesn't work on Windows 98.

It doesn't work on Apple's OS

It doesn't work in Linux- not even using wine. Last year it worked fine as long as you had the latest version of wine. This year, with a little tweaking, I managed to enter all the data, only to have it crash at the point of submitting it to the ATO.

Lucky I'm paranoid when it comes to saving my work, so I was able to use Josh's Windows laptop to open my file then send it to the ATO. Then I did Margaret's return. In each case I clicked on the "feedback" button to tell them that I want them to make it available on Linux.

Last year I sent a long email to the then Prime Minister complaining about the ATO's lack of responsiveness to Linux users. I got the usual bureaucratic brush off with the classic line "The ATO has determined there is not enough demand from Linux users to make it worth while to make its programs available in Linux." How do they determine this? Apparently not enough people can find their way to a feedback page on the relevant web page to request it- I've gone looking for this page and it is not easy to find, and probably only exists in somebody's imagination somewhere.

The next hurdle with the ATO will come at the end of the month when I have to do the quarterly BAS for the church. Last time I changed computers I had to request new digital keys because they just did not work when transferred to the new computer.

What really gets me with the BAS software is that it is written in java so it is possible to run it under Linux with only minimal technical knowledge. It's just a mater of copying the right files to the right folders and off you go. The ATO should be able to put that information on their web-site, but they seem totally captive to Microsoft and resent that people might want to use other operating systems. Early in the piece they even used Microsoft's version of Java to ensure that only Windows users could run their software.

Well that's enough ranting against the tax collectors for now. I'm sure I'll be over the rage when my tax refund appears in my bank account in a couple of weeks :D