Australia's 'e-tax' Windows Only

Kinky Bass Junk writes "As the need to submit tax returns is looming, notification emails are sent out to users of the tax office's services. This year, the Australia Tax Office (ATO) is using a web-based tax return system, as well as the traditional paper based systems. The e-tax website has all the details, and the requirements of the software stand out: 'e-tax is not compatible with Linux or Apple Macintosh computers. However, if you have suitable Windows Emulator software installed, you may be able to use e-tax.' Here is a protest email I have set up for those who disagree with this."

Comments

Taxes windows only?

[no-one-important]

I was hoping that was a tax on windows... oh well.

Re:Taxes windows only?

[bmgoau]

I know im going to get modded as a Troll for this *sigh*

But seriously, why does anyone care, im for cross platform software as much as anyone. And I can see the relevance of this issue if we were dealing with a common day usage piece of software, but we are talking about a tax system that gets used once a year.

I understand the governments position in the issue, that by providing for windows they are providing for the larger portion of citizens with computers, whether we like it or not.

Im sure with some more time in development the system could be written or ported to other operating systems, but I ask is this really necessary?

In Australia you can easily lodge you tax information on paper in about the same amount of time. And if you wish to use e-tax then it is a matter of dropping into your relative's house for a use of their windows based machine.

I know all of this seems a long winded excuse for not having cross platform support, but for a little used program that because of this choice already supports most of the population is such cross platform support a necessity or are we protecting for comfort.

I hardly think that more tax payers money needs to be spent employing people to port the program, and please don't scream community development because I defiantly wouldn't like my tax information to be lodged using a program ported by the community, no matter the quality. I'm sure that almost 100% of people wishing to use e-tax could find some access to a Windows platform once a year.

What is done, is done. It's not the optimal approach and the point of this post is to seek a better environment for cross platform users, but I simply believe that program aesthetics aside, what we have is all we need; anything more is what we want.

Re:Taxes windows only?

[Trejkaz]

Of course, they wouldn't need to port the program if they made it truly web-based in the first place.

Re:Taxes windows only?

[Gyarados]

If people don't take a stand towards such lazy developers, they will only continue to make single-platform software.

Considering there are plenty of viable solutions for cross-platform development available, I don't think there is any excuse for making single-platform software anymore.

The only possible exceptions would be for applications which require unusually fast processing, and for games.

Re:Taxes windows only?

[NotZed]

It's important because it forces an extra fixed cost (a 'tax' if you will) to everyone who might want to access it.

The driving factor of using an online tax system is that it saves the cost of having to go through an accountant and/or the time required to post a physical letter (let alone actually pick up the tax forms from somewhere, which seems to change every year).

This route is closed to those not already using a platform based on a convicted illegal monopoly (well, in other places, Australia seems to have no such laws, or refuses to enforce them).

Tax on Windows users

[Colonel Panic]

Perhaps this is a tax on Windows users. Linux & Mac users need not worry about paying it.

Thank you foreign governments....

[ron_ivi]

for keeping the US economy strong. It's nice to know that when anyone pays a tax in Austrailia, they also pay a tax to Redmond to keep our economy here alive.

Re:Thank you foreign governments....

[mabinogi]

actually, it's Win32 application, that then submits the tax return over the internet.
It is _not_ a web interface....

And of course, it's also not the only way to submit taxes, you can still do it the pen and paper way, or see a tax consultant

Re:Thank you foreign governments....

[KiloByte]

We have exactly the same problem in Poland. The social security "insurance" (read: tax) (ZUS) can be paid only through a Windows program, named Platnik.

The company who wrote Platnik (Prokom Software) has a set of agreement with Microsoft, and any legal attempts are met with a campaign of delaying any action or dismissing it, usually for procedural reasons.
You can read the details (in Polish) on the pages of Janosik, an attempt to reverse engineer Platnik and create an alternative.

Re:Thank you foreign governments....

[menkhaura]

I'm happy to say that in my country (Brazil), the software for tax returns is, since this year, written in Java, and it works like a charm on Linux, BSD or whatever operating system that has a JVM.

This is not a new thing.

[bobinabottle]

e-tax has been windows only for years. I use a mac and have Virtual PC installed so it works fine. In fact, I think it's the only thing I use Virtual PC for.

Erm... I wish:

[Cantide]

"Sorry, I can't pay my taxes, I run OS/2"

Re:Editors please check links

[flyingsquid]

The protest email is a 404. You would think the editors would actually check thier links. But no, they can't even do that.

Oh, quit complaining how bad the editors are! I have complete confidence they'll have this fixed by the time the article is reposted as a dupe.

Re:404

[Codester]

Nah, it's probably only compatible with internet explorer! ^_^

The protest

[dysprosia]

You can apparently read the first paragraph of the protest here:

Today I come to you with a sincere request, that should appeal to the self-confessed geeks, and to the socially aware. The Australia Gov't hosts a service known as e-tax to submit your tax return through the Internet, this service has been widely heralded as a success. However, this does not apply to everyone; the educated minority of the Internet world often choose to use alternative operating systems, such as Mac OS or Linux, this software makes claim that you must use an emulator, should you choose to use these OS's. If you know anything about software emulation, you know that it is a difficult task, and one that is preferably avoided. My request is as follows: send an email similar to the one in the furthur text, at the address given, and phone up to register your disgust at this clear favour to global monopolies.

Re:The protest

[Anonymous Coward]

The "educated minority"? Gee anyone who uses Windows is uneducated. Great. What a way to get your word out.

Perhaps you should take your "minority" and realize that the government is trying to do its best to serve the "majority". Make more sense to me, likely a better use of taxpayer money. Personally I use OS-9? Can you please support that too?

Re:The protest

[HD Webdev]

the educated minority of the Internet world often choose to use alternative operating systems,

"The sort of thing not to say when protesting 101"

Re:The protest

[LS]

"self-confessed geeks"

Hmm, no sooner way to get your email deleted then starting it with this.

You might as well send an email to them saying your are a "self-confessed knit-o-holic", and that you want them to start sending out tax forms that can be embroidered.

Give us the source

[lasindi]

Why doesn't the Australian government provide the source code to the public? I'm sure that there would be plenty of programmers willing to port the program to other platforms.

Re:Give us the source

[Josh Triplett]

But surely you could see many programmers hiding little bugs within the program to make themselves tax free. Not everything must or can be open source. Government's might use open source to develop software for their use (which has been done extensivly across Australia) but no government in their right mind would release their software as open source. There are so many security risks involved.

No server programmer in their right mind would trust the client to do validation and use the data it supplies blindly. The server should be validating submitted forms and rejecting those that don't add up; then it doesn't matter what client people use. (For that matter, it's just a *form*; why not use plain HTML forms and work on every browser?) If the security of their tax system depends on their client-side validation, rest assured that there will be modified versions of the software floating around which conveniently omit a few things here and there, whether or not the source is available.

The government doesn't need to write a client for every possible OS, particularly ones that are (for the moment) used by a minority of users. They just need to provide all the information for anyone else to be able to. Releasing the source to their client is one way to do that; another would be a full specification of the protocol. If Australia has a FOIA equivalent, use it to demand the protocol specification.

I support open source as use it frequently, but if your program/OS isn't usable, then is it really any good?

"My toaster is broken, it can't cook pizza!". GNU/Linux isn't designed to run Windows programs. The fact that one particular program running on it can passably do so using emulation is an interesting novelty that benefits some people while transitioning away from the programs in question. It is a stopgap, not a good long-term solution.

Re:Give us the source

[mabinogi]

Because at the moment they provide guarantees and protection when you use the application to submit your taxes.

If they opened the source and allowed non official clients to connect to the service, they could no longer provide those guarantees or protections.

Also, I don't think too many people would be happy trusting their TFN to anything but software provided by the ATO.

Also, the etax software has _never_ been anything but windows only, I don't know why suddenly that's a big problem - or any more of a problem than it was in 1998.

Re:Give us the source

[novakreo]

For all we know there could be glaring bugs in this software (there was in the version that came out last year) and we'll be unable to fix them before submitting a tax return (meaning we'll be responsible for them).

Not actually true. There is a message at the start advising that as long as the user has supplied accurate info, they won't be held liable for any bugs in the e-Tax software.
Plus, you get to see a preview of your tax return (a filled-in form) which you can print and submit by post, if you don't have regular internet access, or are paranoid about electronic submission.

Re:Give us the source

[Tumbleweed]

How can a government ever justify not releasing source code to the public? It's developed with public funds, therefore we own it.

Hmm ... I'll have to use that argument to get into Area 51 to take a ride in whatever cool aircraft they've got there. :)

"Don't point that weapon at me, young man; I'll have you know I pay your salary!"

Re:Give us the source

[mborland]

Your post was humorous, but your analogy (as with most analogies) doesn't shed light on this situation.

You aren't allowed access to many government facilities (esp. military) because of the extreme risk of harm to the greater populace, either through access to dangerous resources (a tank) or information (that could be harmful to millions).

Seeing the source code to an application that serves a tax-filing purpose makes sense because there is, or at least should be, no inherent risk in releasing it. Hacking the protocols would be pointless because the client program, if hacked, could not achieve more access to the service than someone could do using a homebrew client program.

Unless, of course, the government has released software on the client or server side which is inherently not secure, in which case they shouldn't be using this anyway (which is probably the case).

Actually, they typo'd

[jd]

They're really talking about sharp, pointy tacks, to remind users of the hell they are in.

Seems to work with Wine

[vinn]

Just for fun, I tried running it with the latest CVS of Wine. It installs fine (which is most of the problem with Wine these days.) It also launches fine. I wasn't able to get too far since I don't have an Australian tax ID number, but it was enough to launch the program. The help screens were written using the old MS help system and not the newer CHM, so you can use Wine's internal winhelp viewer to view it all. The controls seem to be pretty old, so I imagine the app runs fine with Wine.

I'd give their website a C- for usability. It seems way too technical for the average user to download the app in the first place. They have 4 links before the app download about patches, the description of which would be meaningless to most users and not obvious that they don't need them.

404 Fixed

[Kinky Bass Junk]

Do you know how big an idiot I feel? I had problems with mod_rewrite and .htaccess at the worst possible time, but it's all fixed now :) Sorry again.

That's not OK?

[nate nice]

Considering most people use Windows it makes sense to initially develop a program for Windows. It's a responsible use of tax money. How about the Linux community builds their own open source version? I'm sure it would easily be ported to OS X.

I mean, it would be more disturbing if they only had a version for Be OS, right?

Re:That's not OK?

[thorkummer]

Considering most people use Windows it makes sense to initially develop a program for Windows

Web sites, particularly government web sites, should be written to conform to open web standards, not to the idiosyncracies of particular any particular browser.

Re:That's not OK?

[arcade]

Bullshit. It does not make sense to develop it for windows only. In Norway we've got a web based system which are pretty standard-compatible - and thus compatible with most browsers.

Heck, even our new "Bank-ID" system, a common system to identify yourself to all the banks, are standards-based. It requires a web browser with a Java-plugin, and that's it.

Develop for a standard first, and you won't have stupid restrictions later on. Developing for 'one platform first' is nothing but pure stupidity.

Sadly in mexico is the same history

[mxpengin]

Mexican Goverment has many web tools that must be used by tax payers , sadly this tools require M$ IExplorer to be used. The funny part is that many of this tools are written in java, and they work in part in other browsers/architechtures ... but I guess they never took the time/effort to check them to work correctly but in ie.

Email Link

[xlr8ed]

* Email the ATO: http://www.ato.gov.au/corporate/content.asp?doc=/c ontent/PA_emailenquiry.html

* Letter Base (the one I used):

I am writing to express my concern over the implementation of "e-tax" in a very specific environment. Your choice to only permit those using Microsoft Windows, or certain emulation software, has placed a disgusting bias over the current market monopolies.

Open Source Software, such as Linux, is attributed with the characteristic of being FREE. To exploit a cliche - free as in speech, as well as free as in beer. By restricting access to only those who can afford Microsoft software, you have placed strains on myself and many others who find themselves liberated of the pressures of proprietry software. I implore you to consider the needs of a wide spectrum of PC users, instead of just those who can afford disgustingly overpriced software, without the need to run _furthur_ software that would likely fail in order to emulate. One possible solution to this is to open the source code up for conversion, and security, by the general population. Either that, or allow a standard protocol for tax returns, so as the general population can code their own software for use with tax returns.

Sincerely Frustrated,
David McKenzie
http://www.freemm.org/

Please note: The contents of this email and any subsequent replies are subject to publishing on mulitple platforms. Please inform me if you do not wish for your replies to be published.

It's easy to make code portable through QT......

[rolfwind]

The requirements: http://www.ato.gov.au/individuals/content.asp?doc= /content/32613.htm&page=3&H3 Why in the world do Governments want to be dependent on a foreign company's closed-source proprietary software is beyond me. I understand the need to get the most common platform but supercomplex software projects like Firefox can manage Mac/Linux/Windows (through QT???) - why can't a government? It will save them headaches in the long-run, if the code is written to be portable and platform independent. I get into the same mood when I see a website warning me it's only configured for IE or Active X. What is that BS?

Overreaction

[wbren]

As soon as this news item was posted on slashdot, people began bashing the Australian government for only supporting Windows (or writing "protest emails" like the submitter did). It was as if they were saying, "How dare they insult us Linux/Mac users? They are supporting evil Microsoft and alienating all us geeks." They made it Windows-only because they looked at the numbers, plain and simple. Windows is what the vast majority of taxpayers find easiest to use, because it's what they are used to. Most taxpayers use Windows. It is more popular than Linux/MacOS. Before I continue, I fully realize this comment will be modded into the depths of Hell.

The government's goal is not to convert people to Linux/Mac/OSS, or even to support that minority. Their goal is to cut down on massive amounts of paperwork and make it easier for most people to pay their taxes. The quickest and cheapest way to do that is by releasing a Windows program to pay taxes, duh. Someone even suggested taking this matter to the courts, comparing it to handicapped/women's rights.

"Your honor, I don't want to use Windows because it sucks and MS is evil, and I don't want to use the traditional paper system because I'm an elitist computer-literate citizen. Therefore, the government should be required to release a Mac/Linux version of the tax software." The response would be: Tough luck, use paper. You're lucky to have a computerized system to begin with.

Here are some things to remember:

• Just because eTax is Windows-only doesn't mean Australia is waging a war on Linux/Mac. It doesn't mean they are "supporting global monopolies". They are casting the widest net with the least cost, which unfortunately is something government rarely attempts.
• The government has better things to do than cater to everyone who uses an OS 90% of people don't use. Sorry, there are much more important things out there.
• They didn't rule out support for other operating systems in the future. They even suggested alternatives for now (Wine, etc).
• It's better to release a test version on one OS than maintain three test versions for three different operating systems. Give them time.

Re:Overreaction

[samtihen]

Ok. I'm not an OS Zealot. I currently use Windows XP on my personal computer.

I disagree with the idea of making something "Windows only" when it is in no way necessary. Equivalent applications could be written in Java, or (preferably) could be completely web based.

Both of these options would work for all users. Neither of these options would be more expensive.

What happened is very simple. The government hired a company that poorly engineered their software.

You are right, it probably doesn't matter to 90% of the people. But don't pretend it would have been harder or more expensive to do it right and have it work for 100% of people.

Explain to me why you would want a government to artificially limit the usability of something as important as Tax Software.

Re:Give me a break

[Admiral Burrito]

You only have time to get a single version of the client ready so which OS do you support first?

All of them.

Cross-platform app development is only painful if you try to do it after the code has been targeted to a single platform. If you aim for portability right from the start, it isn't hard to do.

This isn't new

[SlightOverdose]

I've submitted my last two tax returns using e-tax, and havn't had a problem with booting into windows.

Billions of dollars will change hands based on the data entered into e-tax. Extremely strict testing is needed, and supporting multiple platforms would make this all the more difficult.

Given that
a) Non-windows platforms make up only a few percent of the market; and
b) Most non-windows platforms can successfully emulate windows well enough to run e-tax (Although I wouldn't risk the potential for errors)
c) You are still able to use the standard paper based submission, or an accountant (And your probably much better off using an accountant).

I can understand the decision to only support windows.

Re:Give me a break

[The Bubble]

You only have time to get a single version of the client ready so which OS do you support first?

I can see it now:

Online tax form application released; compatible only with 100% GNU/Linux based operating systems. Millions of citizens switch to Linux overnight to file taxes. BSD and Solaris form a coalition alledging that governments are monopolies. Microsoft takes the government to court, citing their patents for "an online system by which choice of operating system is passively forced."

In a related story, a record ten million new users join slashdot in an effort to "sh0 d3r 1337 sk1||z"

The future is bright indeed.

Re:It's easy to make code portable through QT.....

[natrius]

1. Firefox uses its own cross-platform toolkit, XUL, not Qt.
   
2. Using Qt would make them have to pay for licenses or GPL their program. Since it's not GPL'd already, I assume they have a good reason for doing so. That assumption is most likely wrong, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
   
3. Many developers aren't well versed in cross-platform development, so hiring developers based on that criteria would probably come at a premium. A Windows-only program, while not ideal, works for most, if not all people. Most people at least have a Windows machine lying around, can run the program in Wine, or have access to a Windows machine at a library. Is it really worth wasting tax money to cater to the small percentage of people that this slightly inconveniences?

Except the UK equivalent site *is* cross-platform

[rklrkl]

Unfortunately, all your points are invalid because the UK equivalent tax site is and always has been cross-platform (I used Linux and Mozilla or Firefox without a problem) and shows that, basically, the Aussie government were utterly incompetent when initially setting up the site.

If it's anything like what happened with the official UK lottery site (which banned almost all non-IE *and* non-Windows users from its online games until earlier this year), it'll take about 3 years before the Aussies bother to do another site redesign cycle and suddenly realise what a snafu they originally made.

Japanese e-Tax Windows only

[okumura]

Japanese e-Tax http://www.e-tax.nta.go.jp/ which has been around for some time is also Windows only.