I refer to last Saturday's article, 'Compulsory tax e-filing for firms with 100 or more staff'.

The Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (Iras) said it has done all it can to make e-filing as painless as possible for employers.

However, I believe it can do more to make it as painless as possible for employees.

I experienced problems e-filing earlier this year, which I started close to two weeks before the deadline.

Upon submitting my tax form the first time, I received an error message.

I repeatedly tried - and failed - to log in using the same password I had used to log in just minutes earlier, and ended up having to ask for a new personal identification number (PIN).

It takes five working days for the PIN to be mailed on request.

I e-mailed Iras to ask if it had received my tax form as I did not know whether it had been submitted electronically or not.

The reply from Ms Marissa Zainal from the individual income tax division did not answer my question.

Instead, she asked me to log in to mytaxportal to check whether the e-filing was successful.

Obviously, I had to wait five days, until I received my new PIN, to check this.

If Iras had simply replied to my question via e-mail, this would have saved me some time and trouble.

It did not end there. After I got my new PIN, I still could not log in.

The error message I received was that I had exceeded the maximum number of attempts and had to request a new PIN.

This was really strange as I had tried to log in just once with the new PIN.

Thinking the reason could be I had not cleared my cache, I proceeded to do so and even used a different PC to log in, but I still received the same error message.

I called the Iras helpline and was asked to file by telephone instead.

This took me quite a while as I had never filed by phone and was not used to doing so.

I e-mailed Iras again, stating my problems and asking to have a choice next year to file either electronically or on paper.

Ms Marissa told me I could request one package but not both.

I think most Net-savvy workers would prefer to file their income tax electronically.

However, I suggest Iras be more flexible in responding to user issues like those I encountered, and make sure its IT system is robust enough to handle a large volume of hits.

Huang Meifang (Ms)

This article was first published in The Straits Times on 25 June 2008.