< rant>
Ok, so I made up that number. But it seems like a reasonable figure given that it’s the IRS. And that they handle all the tax money that comes in at tax time. I mean, it’s not like it’s a small chunk of change or anything.
But listen, here I am, struggling to wade through the piles of forms that I need to fill out to create my very own corporation and then I hit the Employer Identification Number (aka EIN) application. Whoa fella. What the heck is this thing?
Apparently it’s an HTMLized form… that looks identical to the print version. Complete with styleized inputs that look like “write-in” fields. Okkkkaaaayyy…..
So I can get over the interface, but the things that they left in, well, they just don’t make sense. For example, when I choose the Corporation entity, you ask me to “enter form number to be filed”. Like I have any effing clue?! Look, you’re the ones who know what forms I need to fill in — this is your system. And ok, while running a business may not be an entitlement that I should consider guarenteed, you could at least give me some clue as to what you’re looking for.
So ok, you could remedy that with a hyperlink. It’s the thing at the end that proves to me that you’re wasting our tax dollars: when you ask me to “sign” the document, you ask me to “TYPE OR PRINT CLEARLY”. Are you completely out of your mind?? Do you think I’m on a tablet or something? What is this “printing” that you speak of? Ok, let’s face it: you’ve just lost all credibility.
BUT, if you had any credibility left whatsoever, you would have damned yourself to eternal Web One Point Oh status with your antiquated browser requirements (do I hear the Internet Antique Roadshow coming around the bend? I think so!) Yeah, and if that weren’t the most annoying thing ever, the fact that after seven attempts, I couldn’t get a successful submission through your system proves what a boondoggle spending any money on the IRS IT infrastructure was.
Tomorrow, I’m going to print out this damn form and fax it to you.
Crap.
If only I had a printer.
< /rant>
4 Comments
Man, That sucks. When I helped my mother do her S-Corp, we took the the DBA went to the county building filed paper work and then sent that to the Feds. A coupel weeks later she got a TIN (tax ID #) from the Feds.. Which is the same as an EIN if I recall correctly
Yeah — it’s just, with so much innovation happening all over the place, you’d hope that some of that would spread to the government… apparently not. And sure, the government is a huge beast, but still, there’s still a clear need for betterment of these kind of services if they’re going to provide them at all.
I agree, The goverment needs to become a 21st century beast. Need to stop spending money where it is not needed and spend it where it is…
Government’s are there to either confuse or upset people.
If they can’t create Macro-confusion, they create departments to create micro-confusion.
In fact, in the UK (Ben will testify for me here!), we even have Capita (impolitelly called Crapita) whose job it is to get all the government IT contracts and bollox them all up so that they end up costing us billions more than they were supposed to!
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[...] After dealing with the IRS site and then hopping over to Blinksale, I realized the beauty of well-designed forms. One key ingredient? Any field in your form must be able to be figured out by your target audience. If you’re asking for something that your audience might not be able to figure out, you should explain what you’re looking for or provide an example of possible values or responses. Blinksale gets this right about 94% of the time. The government? 20. At most. [...]
[...] The Citizens « $8 billion later, and the IRS still sucks [...]