Several years ago a list of questions was published in a well-known newspaper. They were designed to help someone understand another culture. For example: What makes people laugh? What makes them dance?
Over the years, as we moved from country to country, this list proved very useful. It helped us understand how other societies worked, to get beneath the surface of our adopted land, and integrate more easily.
We have also added our own questions to the list. One is: what is the relationship between the police and the people? And, what’s it like to make a tax declaration?
In Hong Kong and Singapore paying tax was pretty much pain free. The tax forms were in English and the process was hugely automated. The tax rates were also low.
In Austria, it was a bit more complicated because the whole process had to be done in German. This was not a major hassle though, because our German is OK.
The biggest administrative problem we encountered in Austria was not with the tax system but with the national health insurance system, which inexplicably deleted us from its records every few months. Then, we would have to take a trip to the administrative offices in the suburbs of Vienna and persuade one of the grumpy employees to fix the problem.
Then there’s Switzerland
By far the worst place we’ve had to make a tax return is Switzerland. Not only is there a 36 page form that has to be completed each year, there are a further 40 pages that need to be checked. Tens of supporting documents have to be assembled. It’s all done in the most complicated German legalese we have ever seen. When you finally make it to the tax office, with vast reams of paper and several tax codes bulging under your arm, you are immediately assumed to be a fool or a time-waster. You also have to switch to speaking Swiss-German, which is as good as another language.
More than two years after you have made the desk-buckling declaration, they send you the bill, to which they have added a hefty interest charge, despite themselves being responsible for the delay. In the very unlikely event that you are due a refund, they will keep the money until the next filing. If they have made a mistake and you have paid too much tax, they will keep the money too, but promise to update their records. (Warning: that does not mean they will actually update them.)
The Swiss authorities love extracting money from people, especially from their foreign residents.
Yesterday, I went to file our tax return in Taiwan and it couldn’t have been more different. There was a whole room of people to help foreign residents, with signs in Chinese, English and Japanese. If you needed to wait a few minutes for one of the staff to become available, you could watch a video of them playing a quiz game, where they have to guess the Chinese translation for complicated words related to tax payments in English. “What is a resident amortised depreciation assessment?” Someone would quickly put their hand on the buzzer and laugh. “I know!”, they’d shout, and then give the answer while the others applauded.
The tax declaration itself was two pages long, and one of the staff filled it out for us. “Where would you like us to send the refund?”, they said 10 minutes later. And that was it.
Job done.
As we left the tax office, we walked past one of the hospitals where mothers spend their first two weeks after giving birth in Taiwan, to get used to living with a new child. Actually, to call them hospitals is a bit of a misnomer because they are more like five-star hotels. In the window was a computer terminal with the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), the image which strikes fear into all, when a Windows operating system crashes.
As always, the screen was filled with a series of bizarre instructions. “Windows has shut down. Please restart in Safe Mode and disable BIOS. Remove recently installed peripherals. Press F8. Be sure to backup your cache. Check Advanced Startup Options (why the capitals?). STOP: 000000 8×8888 66233xx 45fFGTcc”
In English, it was gibberish. So imagine what it must have been like for the harried hospital staff who have lots of new mothers to deal with and speak only Chinese. Or, put another way, imagine what it would be like if the BSOD only showed the error messages in Swahili when the computers crashed in the central hospital of Little Rock, Arkansas.
Microsoft could learn something from the Taiwanese tax office about how to communicate with their customers. So could the Swiss.