Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?
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Before we can get to the fun part, let me give you a quick crash course on how Australian taxes work (please don't leave!)...
In Australia, the financial (fiscal) year start on 1 July and ends on 30 June. At the end of the financial year you have to submit a tax return to the wonderful people at the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). If you are an employee with no side income and don't intend to claim any deductions, this is actually a mostly painless process because all of the information is already pre-filled for you, so you just click "OK" and "Submit".
Oh, unless you are a foreigner not eligible for Medicare in which case the process is not straightforward at all...
Firstly, your visa conditions require you to hold private health insurance substituting the Medicare.
Secondly, the ATO will still automatically deduct the Medicare levy from your pay check (2%) and you only get it back at the end of the financial year, essentially giving the government an interest-free loan.
Of course they won't just give the money back to you like that, you first have to fill out a Medicare Entitlement Statement (MES) form, print it, sign it, scan it and email it to the MES Unit, alongside a scan of your passport, showing that indeed you are very much a foreigner. Then you have to wait about a month for the response to arrive via snail mail, after which you can finally file the tax return with the ATO to get your money back.
Well, at least that was my experience until the last time I had to do it, before I applied for permanent residency. See, even being in the process of applying for permanent residency makes you eligible for Medicare. By sheer coincidence my application was filed on 2 July, two days after the end of the financial year. This meant that I didn't have to worry about being partly eligible the last year financial year.
Instead of getting the usual letter telling me that I was not eligible for Medicare for the full financial year, I got a letter with this in it:
Wait, what? You have records showing that I have applied for permanent residency but not when? And you need me to give you your own paperwork instead of just asking the guy next door?
Anyways, one of the things that you have to declare on your tax return is any income you make through the pitiful interest earned on your bank account. If you give your bank your Tax File Number, the bank will automatically send this information to the ATO, so when you get to that step, you don't have to do anything other than press "Save and continue":
And commit tax fraud? Because I thankfully have lower confidence in the data than the ATO, I logged into my bank account and pulled up the interest statement. It showed a different, 11% higher amount!
Also in case you didn't notice the note, you get an even more strongly worded one if you click "Adjust":
Gee, I wonder who they'd chose to penalise if I don't adjust it. For some reason I don't think it's going to be the bank...
So how did this happen?
Sorry, this is where I have to quickly explain how UBank pays interest. They have a base interest rate (currently 0.10%) and then a "bonus" rate of 1.75% if you meet certain criteria (deposit $200 into the account). For some reason, last year they decided to change how the interest is paid out. Instead of getting a single interest payment at the end of the month with both the base and the bonus, they now pay you the base interest and the bonus interest separately:
I'm sure you can already tell where the missing 11% went
.
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I'm glad I live in
instead of 
. When I moved to , fairly obviously I wasn't a citizen of , but I was able to sign up for "Assurance Maladie". It only took five months and one resubmission of documents. The resubmission was because the supporting documents became detached from the application, although...Well. How to describe this...
The documents were no longer attached to the application. They could not say where the documents were (to reattach them), but they were very insistent that the documents were not lost. They didn't know where the documents were, but the documents were not lost. Yes, they actually had the brass-faced balls to tell me that the documents could not be found, but were not lost.
(1)Life's too short to be fucking around with that kind of shit, so I just resubmitted the documents, and the second time around it just worked.
The late Mrs Cynic's (mis)adventures in changing her name (because it was so easy in English law), well, that's a whole other story, and one that I'd rather not discuss at this point, other than to say that it took another three years above and beyond my five months.
In other, completely unrelated, news, I have finally found someone who could supply a jewelry-grade(3) object that looks like a safety pin but fits a 38 mm industrial piercing.(2) I am happy.
(1) Yes, I'm still annoyed about that. Why do you ask?
(2) If you look it up, you'll see what I'm talking about, and yes, getting that done is every bit as painful as it seems like it would be. It's a two-hole cartilage piercing in the little wall around the upper part of the ear.
(3) It's supposed to look like a safety pin, but it isn't made of dubious-quality allegedly-stainless steel metal with a questionable finish and a sharp point. (Yes, it's 925-fine silver with no nickel in it...)
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@Deadfast > Australian Taxation Office
I admire you folks for that name. First taxation department I've ever heard of with "Taxation" in the name.
For the rest? I'm a USA citizen, I can't really point and laugh at anyone's tax rigamarole.
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@Bim-Zively Here's a second: ours is "belastingdienst", which translates as "tax service"
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@Bim-Zively There are plenty more but it seems a lot of countries do their best to avoid the (equivalent of the) word “tax” in the relevant service’s name.
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@PleegWat said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
@Bim-Zively Here's a second: ours is "belastingdienst", which translates as "tax service"
Sounds more like "burden service".
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@topspin burdening would be more accurate.
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@topspin said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
Sounds more like "burden service".
Technically, it does. You would also use the word “belasting” when talking about how much load is put on something, for example, or whether someone is overworked or not. Using the same word for taxation is metaphorical, per the world's largest dictionary (in its physical form anyway): 4. Iemand of iets bezwaren met eene geldelijke verplichting — that is, “To burden someone or something with a monetary obligation.”
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@Gurth Also true in English:
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@Gurth said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
@Bim-Zively There are plenty more but it seems a lot of countries do their best to avoid the (equivalent of the) word “tax” in the relevant service’s name.
Ours has a very apt acronym
SARS
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@dkf Except the etymology is completely different. “Last” in Dutch is literally “burden”, with the prefix be- and suffix -ing making it a noun meaning something like “enburdening”. “Tax” goes back to Latin taxo with the meaning of “I handle”, “I censure”, “I appraise”, “I compute”. It seems “tax” in the sense of “non-monetary burden” derives from that, whereas in Dutch it’s pretty much the other way around.
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@Gurth said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
@Bim-Zively There are plenty more but it seems a lot of countries do their best to avoid the (equivalent of the) word “tax” in the relevant service’s name.
That list is obviously complete
- some items are actually just a "Ministry of Finance" (which is 
responsible for the revenue, but so it's in other countries where specific agency is listed).
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@Vault_Dweller said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
@Gurth said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
@Bim-Zively There are plenty more but it seems a lot of countries do their best to avoid the (equivalent of the) word “tax” in the relevant service’s name.
Ours has a very apt acronym
SARSI raise you the Czech translation for "revenue service":
FU
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@Deadfast said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
@Vault_Dweller said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
@Gurth said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
@Bim-Zively There are plenty more but it seems a lot of countries do their best to avoid the (equivalent of the) word “tax” in the relevant service’s name.
Ours has a very apt acronym
SARSI raise you the Czech translation for "revenue service":
FUAnd I raise the german online tax declaration portal ELSTER, named after a magpie - a bird inclined to steal shiny objects made of precious metals.
Alternatively, it means ELektronische STeuerERklärung. Yeah, sure.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
@Gurth said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
@Bim-Zively There are plenty more but it seems a lot of countries do their best to avoid the (equivalent of the) word “tax” in the relevant service’s name.
That list is obviously complete
- some items are actually just a "Ministry of Finance"That’s not the ones I posted it for :) There’s a good number on it that do have the word “tax” in the local language in the name.
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@Kamil-Podlesak said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
@Deadfast said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
@Vault_Dweller said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
@Gurth said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
@Bim-Zively There are plenty more but it seems a lot of countries do their best to avoid the (equivalent of the) word “tax” in the relevant service’s name.
Ours has a very apt acronym
SARSI raise you the Czech translation for "revenue service":
FUAnd I raise the german online tax declaration portal ELSTER, named after a magpie - a bird inclined to steal shiny objects made of precious metals.
Alternatively, it means ELektronische STeuerERklärung. Yeah, sure.
Do they also aggressively attack anyone everything their territory like the Australian magpie?
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That thumbnail is a complete misrepresentation. Magpies are sweet and wholesome and the only people who get tormented by them are those who are being dicks to the poor birds anyway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vErVV9cOmws
Last year the local magpie family brought around three (!) of their cute silly babies, begging for food as they watch a parent grab something out of the ground 5 cm in front of them.
Then one day the mother mysteriously vanished, replaced about a week later by a vicious stepmum who wouldn’t let the poor juveniles have anything as she was around, dive-bombing and pecking at their backs… she’d still let them summon a handout for her to pilfer, of course, the bitch. The poor things were so traumatised, they’d pose as submissively as possible the moment she appeared anywhere less than 10 metres away, trying to turn their necks up further than physically possible.
Eventually they cleared off to parts unknown and all I really have is this photo to remember one by.
I thought it was an amusing contrast between species; the magpie’s on the right.
That tree is one of their favourites, with the whole family hiding silently amongst its branches on hot summer days.
Unlike the mother before her, stepmum seemed far less diligent about preparing a nest, and this year I’ve seen a grand total of zero babies. Not impressed by her. Ah well, the rainbows brought a baby around instead and that thing was hilarious. Somehow it managed to land on the side of a vertical brick wall, on multiple occasions.
The distant warbles of magpies is one of the most pleasant sounds of nature, and anyone who can”t experience it is missing out. Magpies are actually good mimics, but they don’t show off so much. A few times I was convinced a butcherbird was outside when it turned out to just be the male magpie singing to himself on the roof. He was very proud of one particular butcherbird sound he picked up; he basically practised it on repeat for an entire hour once. Managed to get his rendition of it stuck in my head!
This page has a whole bunch more pictures and recordings:
As you can see, magpies are so charming he uses one as the site icon.
Basically, magpies are lovely (even stepmum, sometimes) and I needed to get the record straight.
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@Kamil-Podlesak I never even thought of that. Brill
iant.
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@kazitor said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
the whole family hiding silently [...] The distant warbles of magpies is one of the most pleasant sounds of nature
Well from that description, Australian magpies are clearly a very different thing than the ones around here.
Filed under: not sure if
or 
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@Gurth That's OK, in French, a tax can be either "un impôt" or "une taxe", depending on what's being taxed. The second one obviously comes from the same linguistic source as "tax" in English, while the first is ...
Well, that ô is really an os - back in the day, the word would have been impost, and the verb "to tax someone with an impôt still has the "s" - it's imposer, which bears an uncomfortable similarity to English "impose", and nobody likes to be imposed upon...
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@remi said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
@kazitor said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
the whole family hiding silently [...] The distant warbles of magpies is one of the most pleasant sounds of nature
Well from that description, Australian magpies are clearly a very different thing than the ones around here.
Yes, they’re better.
First time (and subsequent times) I heard a recording of a Eurasian magpie, I felt shame and sorrow that that horrible thing could be the flag carrier for the name “magpie.”
Something else I should have mentioned in my diatribe: In Other News Today… has had numerous other examples of magpies being awesome.
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@kazitor evidently the magpies have consumed the majority of your soul. Such a sad case.
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@kazitor said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
Well from that description, Australian magpies are clearly a very different thing than the ones around here.
Yes, they’re better.
They're Australian; they're better at wanting to kill you. The sweet behavior and cute vocalizations are just a trick to lull you into a false sense of security.
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@Gribnit said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
@kazitor evidently the magpies have consumed the majority of your soul. Such a sad case.
@HardwareGeek said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
The sweet behavior and cute vocalizations are just a trick to lull you into a false sense of security.
These are all good trades
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@kazitor said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
Magpies are sweet and wholesome
[..]
a vicious stepmum who wouldn’t let the poor juveniles have anything as she was around, dive-bombing and pecking at their backs…@kazitor said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
the only people who get tormented by them are those who are being dicks
A.k.a cyclists.
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@Deadfast said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
@kazitor said in Dates are hard... and may lead to tax fraud?:
Magpies are sweet and wholesome
[..]
a vicious stepmum who wouldn’t let the poor juveniles have anything as she was around, dive-bombing and pecking at their backs…There are exceptions to everything.
taxing
Australian Magpie ([Gymnorhina] Cracticus tibicen)
