the daily snivel
The Rage, Oh How it Burns
Sit right back and I'll tell you a tale of a little trip I took today to the Canada Revenue Agency's website.
I took a trip there because I was quite anxious to check the status of my tax return. This is a return on I filed electronically on March 13, and one that indicated I was owed a refund. The good folks at the CRA promptly sent me a pre-assessment notice indicating that I had to send them a copy of my T2202A slip and my 2004 rent receipts, which I sent out the very next day owing to how eager I was to receive that refund.
Many, many weeks later, I'm still waiting around to see what came of the whole thing. This is in large part to the fact that a refund would come in handy right about now. As we all know, April is the blackest month for a student, when the student loans and lines of credit and the paltry savings from last summer have been stretched as far as they can go, the pennies have all been rolled, and the instant noodles are quickly running out. It's the time of year when the old bottle of half-finished wine that you keep around for cooking starts looking mighty good for drinking; when you get friendly phone calls from Rogers and MBNA asking you to call them back, and oh wouldn't it be nice if you wrote more often and sent a cheque and, look, they even include a self-addressed envelope to make it easy.
So, I went to the CRA website to check the status of my account. Now, to prevent identity fraud and protect the privacy of users, there are a number of safeguards built into the website, which is only fair. You have to register for an "epass" with a user name and password on an encrypted page. And to do that, you have to provide your social insurance number (OK), your date of birth (uh huh), your postal code (no problem), and the figure you entered at line 150 from your 2003 or 2004 tax return forms (hmm). Of course, you can't do any of that if you're running Safari as your web browser, which they tell you with regret, and then when you launch Internet Explorer for Macintosh and get halfway into the website, it tells you there's an error and nags you to enable cookies, and since they were enabled all along, you give up and fire up the old desktop PC.
Finally I had a browser that worked with the CRA website -- IE 6. So, I duly entered my SIN, my date of birth, my postal code, and the figure from line 150 on my 2004 return, and submitted it. I sat and waited for the system to churn that information, and once it did, it returned with a screen telling me that the authentication had failed. It also told me that I only had five attempts before it locked the account out completely. I tried again, thinking I must have mistyped something. It failed again. I tried it from a different computer upstairs. It failed again. Then I went downstairs and read the website thoroughly, and realized that the information from line 150 had to correspond to an assessed return, dontcha know, so maybe the problem is that my return still wasn't assessed but was sitting in a file somewhere with the 15 million other returns that piled in this tax season.
So I tried to find my 2003 return because I could also use that information.
I found it, but I had to reinstall my 2003 tax software to view the information. After half an hour of turning my room upside down, I found the install disks. Then I couldn't open the file from last year because the software insisted on being updated first. So I downloaded the 9 megabyte file over my dialup connection, fired up the software, and copied down the line number. Aha. Finally we were getting somehwere.
I returned to the website, feeling that victory must be close at hand. This was my fourth try out of five possible attempts before the account was locked. I again entered my SIN, my date of birth, my postal code, and my line 150 statement from my 2003 return.
Accepted! Now we're cooking with gas!
Then I had to create a username for myself -- no problem, I thought. This I have done many times before, and it was created with ease. Then I had to create a hint in case I forgot my password. OK, so it had something to do with school. OK, then I had to make another hint, something to do with an influential person. OK, and then I had to make another hint, something to do with an important date in my life. "Phew! All this verification is hard work," I thought.
Then I had to create a password. Happiness, optimism -- nay, a childlike wonder -- filled me. Surely now I would be finished and be able to find out when my badly needed refund was coming to me. I was brought to a confirmation screen and I entered my username and password.
The website then told me that the final stage in the activation of my new epass was the entry of the confirmation code they were sending me.
By mail.
Which would take 5 business days, and in the absence of which none of the steps I'd just taken were of any help or made any different at all.
It's times like these you want to say "Arrrgh!" and not sound like a cartoon character but rather the soul tormented to the very limit of sanity that you truly are.
Oh the rage, and oh how it burns inside me.
Comments:I took a trip there because I was quite anxious to check the status of my tax return. This is a return on I filed electronically on March 13, and one that indicated I was owed a refund. The good folks at the CRA promptly sent me a pre-assessment notice indicating that I had to send them a copy of my T2202A slip and my 2004 rent receipts, which I sent out the very next day owing to how eager I was to receive that refund.
Many, many weeks later, I'm still waiting around to see what came of the whole thing. This is in large part to the fact that a refund would come in handy right about now. As we all know, April is the blackest month for a student, when the student loans and lines of credit and the paltry savings from last summer have been stretched as far as they can go, the pennies have all been rolled, and the instant noodles are quickly running out. It's the time of year when the old bottle of half-finished wine that you keep around for cooking starts looking mighty good for drinking; when you get friendly phone calls from Rogers and MBNA asking you to call them back, and oh wouldn't it be nice if you wrote more often and sent a cheque and, look, they even include a self-addressed envelope to make it easy.
So, I went to the CRA website to check the status of my account. Now, to prevent identity fraud and protect the privacy of users, there are a number of safeguards built into the website, which is only fair. You have to register for an "epass" with a user name and password on an encrypted page. And to do that, you have to provide your social insurance number (OK), your date of birth (uh huh), your postal code (no problem), and the figure you entered at line 150 from your 2003 or 2004 tax return forms (hmm). Of course, you can't do any of that if you're running Safari as your web browser, which they tell you with regret, and then when you launch Internet Explorer for Macintosh and get halfway into the website, it tells you there's an error and nags you to enable cookies, and since they were enabled all along, you give up and fire up the old desktop PC.
Finally I had a browser that worked with the CRA website -- IE 6. So, I duly entered my SIN, my date of birth, my postal code, and the figure from line 150 on my 2004 return, and submitted it. I sat and waited for the system to churn that information, and once it did, it returned with a screen telling me that the authentication had failed. It also told me that I only had five attempts before it locked the account out completely. I tried again, thinking I must have mistyped something. It failed again. I tried it from a different computer upstairs. It failed again. Then I went downstairs and read the website thoroughly, and realized that the information from line 150 had to correspond to an assessed return, dontcha know, so maybe the problem is that my return still wasn't assessed but was sitting in a file somewhere with the 15 million other returns that piled in this tax season.
So I tried to find my 2003 return because I could also use that information.
I found it, but I had to reinstall my 2003 tax software to view the information. After half an hour of turning my room upside down, I found the install disks. Then I couldn't open the file from last year because the software insisted on being updated first. So I downloaded the 9 megabyte file over my dialup connection, fired up the software, and copied down the line number. Aha. Finally we were getting somehwere.
I returned to the website, feeling that victory must be close at hand. This was my fourth try out of five possible attempts before the account was locked. I again entered my SIN, my date of birth, my postal code, and my line 150 statement from my 2003 return.
Accepted! Now we're cooking with gas!
Then I had to create a username for myself -- no problem, I thought. This I have done many times before, and it was created with ease. Then I had to create a hint in case I forgot my password. OK, so it had something to do with school. OK, then I had to make another hint, something to do with an influential person. OK, and then I had to make another hint, something to do with an important date in my life. "Phew! All this verification is hard work," I thought.
Then I had to create a password. Happiness, optimism -- nay, a childlike wonder -- filled me. Surely now I would be finished and be able to find out when my badly needed refund was coming to me. I was brought to a confirmation screen and I entered my username and password.
The website then told me that the final stage in the activation of my new epass was the entry of the confirmation code they were sending me.
By mail.
Which would take 5 business days, and in the absence of which none of the steps I'd just taken were of any help or made any different at all.
It's times like these you want to say "Arrrgh!" and not sound like a cartoon character but rather the soul tormented to the very limit of sanity that you truly are.
Oh the rage, and oh how it burns inside me.
