Taxing time for Apple users

CALLING all Apple Mac users. Roll up now for your huge discount on Microsoft Windows 7 for Mac, courtesy of Australian taxpayers.

Yes, you heard right. The Australian taxpayer is now subsidising Microsoft Windows for Apple Mac users by up to 45 per cent.

There are a few conditions, of course. You must load Windows on to your Mac and download and use the e-tax software from the Australian Taxation Office to do your tax return this year, but that’s all.

As it happens, most Apple Mac users would not want a discount for any Microsoft software and would not load it on to their machines if you paid them. Nonetheless the discount is there.

I found out about it the hard way. It is tax time, so I went to the ATO website, as I have done every year since the turn of the century, to download its splendid e-tax software only to find – gasp — that there was no version of it for Apple computers.

Hitherto that had never bothered me. But during the past financial year I have swapped to Apple.

I took the road to Damascus after my PC swallowed photos from last summer’s holidays. Most were still on the camera’s memory card, but all the editing had to be redone, and some ethereal underwater photos of jungle perch in the Mossman Gorge were irretrievably lost. I hold Bill Gates personally responsible.

No amount of expressions of: “Oh gosh, oh bother, where are these precious photos”, or words to that effect, would retrieve them.

The Damascus Road, moreover, was paved with other Microsoft crimes against humanity: printers which would not disgorge lecture notes just minutes before class; inexplicable, “fatal” errors with the loss of all on board; the mystical conversion of the mouse pointer into an endless egg-timer which if used in a real kitchen would turn the eggs into sulphuric dust; and more reboots than shodding the Australian Army since the Boer War.

Each incurred its tally of: “Oh dear, I do hope I will get my printout soon”, and “I’ll just calmly re-read the paper while the computer reboots” and similar expressions of mild frustration.

The final touch came when my wife’s computer turned a learned legal opinion into Greek – seriously, Greek letters replaced the English ones, causing expressions anguish from her that sounded themselves as if they were in Greek.

Over the years, Apple-owning friends have been bemused. Some verged on religious zealotry as they proselytised the virtue of Apples. Why put up with it, they argued. The cost of a new Apple computer would easily pay for itself in time and exasperation alone. But before buying an Apple, I knew there would be a fair amount relearning and mucking about, so I was tempted to persevere with Microsoft.

Also, Windows 7 was on offer and Microsoft had promised that Windows 7 would solve all of the instability and bugs of previous Microsoft operating systems.

Then, I thought, all these promises had been made before: with Windows 98 and Vista and before that. Also there had never been Microsoft help desk, just the good work of users who post their bug fixes on the Web.

So I jumped. My only concern was that many software developers do not do Apple versions.

E-tax is the first example of a really useful application not available for Apple. The Tax Office promised in 2007 that a pilot would run in 2008 and it would be ready in 2009. Given 2.2 million people are expected to use e-tax this year, a Mac version would be used by a least 100,000 people. You would think that it would be worth the ATO’s effort to put a few people on to the task.

Yes, I can buy Windows 7 for Mac and load it on for the sole purpose of doing e-tax and then claim the cost as cost of administering tax affairs. But why should I line the already well-lined pockets of Mr Gates? More pertinently, why should the Australian taxpayer foot part of the bill?

There is a broader lesson here for government use of information technology in its interaction with the public.

Huge savings can be made by replacing paper with electronic communication. Transporting paper around the place is more costly and takes longer than sending things electronically. This might seem odd coming in the form of the printed word in a newspaper, but ultimately it will apply to newspapers.

Nearly all information generated by government has at one stage been in a computer and is capable of being put on the internet in a way readable by anyone with an internet connection irrespective of what platform they are on – Windows, Linux, Apple and so on.

Governments should encourage the public to give the information to the government in electronic form. This is because the electronic form is cheaper and easier to store and retrieve than paper versions.

Further electronic systems do not make arithmetic errors – pretty crucial in tax returns and also important in simple things like adding up several bills and pay them at once.

Wherever possible governments should deliver and receive information in a readable and searchable form. I am not talking about a campaign against gobbledegook, however laudable that might be, but a campaign against providing information in formats which cannot be searched and collated.

Information in PDF or JPG format is virtually useless. Heaps of information in this form is no information at all because the user is looking a pictures of words, not the words themselves.

Scanned in hand-written documents (say, of political donations or MPs’ expenses) are of much less value than the same information in a spreadsheet or word-processing file.

On the government side, information received electronically can be collated, summarised and made use of better than information received on paper.

Governments should not favour one platform over another. Rather they should receive and disseminate information to anyone with access to the internet.

Privacy is difficulty, certainly with something like e-tax. Indeed, in the early days of the internet when e-tax was developed is was more shaky. That is why the Tax Office did not go for an internet-based system.

Now, however, as the Tax Office well knows, internet-based systems with no requirement for Windows or anything else other than an internet connection work securely. The Tax office uses it successfully with Business Activity Statements for people remitting the GST.

The Tax Office did a first-rate job with e-tax. It was pioneering stuff. It is far easier to use than the paper version. But after a decade it is time to pave the gravel road. This should be the last year of Windows-based e-tax. Next year it should be available to all who are on the internet.

As a postscript I have to add that I have not lost any data or had any crashes on my MacBookPro to date, but I am not going to turn into an Appzealot. Windows has some file manipulation, moving and renaming functions not replicated in Apple, but I am not sure they are worth all the other aggravation.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 10 July 2010