There was a time when filling up my taxes and submitting them to the IRA was the most painful thing I could imagine. I mean, many were the days when I feigned sickness or lay in bed the whole day wallowing listlessly just so that I could avoid this chore. But the coming to age of online tax returns, especially the filing of them has put the spring back into my step.
The first time I heard about online tax returns was when my accountant told me about it. Apparently his firm, that processes the tax returns of several individuals like me was among the first few organizations that was chosen for a trail test of the online tax return process. If that sounds like a contradiction in terms, please be informed that lazy people like me were still going to use the services of accounting firms to get our taxes in order. So whether online tax returns became a reality or not, I was still going to use the services of the said accounting firm! In any case, he was the first person to tell me all about online tax returns and he was fairly bubbling with enthusiasm when he told me about it.
Of course, you must remember that this was in the early days of the Internet and many of the capabilities we take for granted nowadays, simply didn’t exist back then. But even at that time, it was a revolutionary concept to be able to file online tax returns. A lot of water has flowed down the bridge since then and nowadays, most of us take online tax returns for granted. It is no longer the disruptive technology that it once was and more and more people have grown up not knowing what a time saver it truly is. Nowadays for instance, it is well and truly possible for an individual to get onto a portal, file for online tax returns, connect to another service provider to get salary and benefits details, integrate the two and then simply press a button to submit the compiled document to a software that calculates the tax, the returns and even tax saving techniques and tips – all for your benefit, simply in a matter of minutes.
But for those of us who learnt about online tax returns relatively later in our lives, it continues to be a novel concept that ranks right up there with the ingenious minds who developed a concept like the Internet in the first place.
