Today is April 15, a date that quite a few different tax authorities in the United States have picked as the deadline for filing annual tax returns. I had to file several returns today, including:
- U.S. Federal Income Tax for my wife and me
- Pennsylvania State Income Tax for my wife and me
- Pennsylvania Local Earned Income Tax for my wife and me
- New Jersey Corporate Business Tax for a company that I partially own
Due to slightly higher than expected income in 2007, my wife and I owed a small amount to the Federal, State, and Local tax authorities. I paid these taxes using my credit card through Pay1040.com, a payment provider closely associated with H&R Block and the TaxCut tax preparation program, and Official Payments Corporation, the payment provider most commonly used by tax authorities in the United States.
Pay1040.com successfully processed my Federal Income Tax payment using the Safari browser that is installed on my wife’s MacBook. She is still using MacOS X 10.4, but all of the software updates have been applied so she is on Safari 3.1. That’s good news, because this is the first time I have used Pay1040.com and I didn’t expected a relatively small provider to have a Safari-friendly payment process.
TaxCut’s Pennsylvania Tax Preparation Software didn’t even offer the option of paying by credit card, so I had to file on paper and use the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue’s website to initiate a credit card payment. Their chosen payment partner is Official Payments.
At Official Payments’ website, I found that I couldn’t make a payment with Safari at all despite the fact that there was no indication that Safari was not a supported browser. I could never get to the page where I could confirm my payment details on either my wife’s MacBook running OS X 10.4 or my fully updated MacBook Pro running Leopard.
I had to switch over to Firefox on my Mac in order to pay what I owed the State of Pennsylvania.
I took advantage of web-based electronic filing offered by the local tax administrator serving my town– a company called Berkheimer Tax Administrator, Inc.. Berkheimer performs this service for lots of towns, school districts, and emergency services districts within Pennsylvania.
Safari didn’t work for interacting with their electronic filing site, and I had to use Firefox to complete the forms. When time came to pay, however, I was warned that the interaction between Berkheimer’s electronic filing solution and Official Payments would only work in Internet Explorer. So, I had to save my session, fire up VMware Fusion, launch IE 7 in Windows XP, login to Berkheimer’s e-filing site, pickup my session where I left off, and make the payment. Forcing someone to use a PC for any step of a tax filing process is simply unacceptable in 2008.
Surprisingly, The New Jersey Division of Taxation had the most Safari-friendly payment system I experienced. They also use Official Payments, but they created their own front end to it. This front end is very simple and apparently had none of the browser-specific JavaScript that is present on Official Payments’ own site. I was surprised because other aspects of the New Jersey state government are pretty IE specific.
I’m not sure if Mac users in other states who needed to make payments when filing their returns had similar experiences. If my experience is typical, the tax authorities need to start now in order to roll out more robust Mac support before the bulk of personal tax returns are due for 2008. Who knows how many Americans will have switched from PC to Mac by this time next year?