TAIPEI: The first day of the annual tax filing period began yesterday with a flood of applications and complaints as the online tax-filing system slowed to a crawl for up to 6 hours, due to heavy user traffic generated over the May Day holiday.
Ministry of Finance Director Lee Ching-hua apologized for the slowdown and said the ministry is taking measures to remedy the situation, for example, the tax bureau will not take its normal lunch break and noon and the tax return office will extend its opening hours to 7 p.m.
Yesterday morning starting at 9 a.m., the online tax-filing system received a massive surge in traffic, with users soon not even able to open the website. The tax bureau was soon inundated with calls from people asking how to access the tax filing site, which only could display an error message saying “system under repair, hard at work.” Tax filers were only able to submit manually filled paper tax forms at tax offices in person.
The system remained largely unresponsive until the system was repaired around 3:45 p.m. and normal operations resumed at 5 p.m. The ministry said it has begun investigating issues with the Fiscal Information Agency and a systems maintenance partner Trade-van Co. to isolate the cause of the incident.
A 38-year-old bank employee surnamed Lee told Apple Daily that she spent half an hour trying in vain to access the site from her computer. Thinking there was something wrong with her computer, she went with her child by taxi to the tax office and it was not until she arrived that she realized that it was a problem with the system. “The page should have said their was a system failure! This was a waste of my time,” complained Lee.
Financial Information Agency director Chen Chuan-hsi said in previous years the system had experienced periods of instability, but nothing so serious, it would generally be resolved within 10 minutes. For this reason, some have questioned whether hackers were behind the outage, but Chen denied this possibility saying “there is no limit on the amount of internet traffic, but there were some design problems.”
In response to criticism from the public over the crash, Lee Ching-hua apologized and assured the public at a press conference yesterday, “There will be no further system abnormalities.”
National Taxation Bureau of Taipei secretary Hsu said as soon as they discovered systemic instability, they immediately provided “four point solution measures,” and extended services through lunch break and stayed open until 7 p.m.
Despite the instability of the site yesterday, Chen said 80,000 tax returns will still filed, much more than the 25,413 returns filed the first day of tax filing last year. He emphasized “There were a lot for tax filings the first day of tax season compared with last year.” However, the year before last, there were 90,000 successful submissions of tax forms, and there were no major system abnormalities reported.
