Thursday, January 20, 2022

tax document: resolved

Every January, our HR department sends us an email with a PDF attachment that explains how we're supposed to generate a year-end financial statement (tax) that's supposed to be sent to HR for processing. Every year, it's a pain in the ass because the PDF sent by HR is written in Konglish and always seems a little outdated. The process involves, first, generating an electronic certificate by going to my bank's website. That's a problem right there because, in generating this certificate, I override the new certificate that I just got put on my phone. (These certificates are part of an elaborate security system. Many, if not most, Korean websites where you can pay for something use an e-certificate of some sort.) 

Anyway, the procedure is: I generate a new certificate to use for my year-end financial statement; I save the e-certificate on my desktop computer's thumb drive, and then it's on to the next step: opening up the government's hometax.go.kr website, calling up my financial data, checking all the right boxes (you select which data to print out), then creating a PDF that gets saved on my computer. This PDF must then be attached to an email addressed to HR. Needless to say, the government website is a nightmare to navigate, too, and because I go through this procedure only once a year, I always end up forgetting how I'm supposed to do it (keeping in mind that HR's "helpful" PDF instructions aren't all that helpful).

After struggling my way through my bank's website and the government website, I finally had a PDF file attachment to send to HR... and then it was a matter of going back to the banking website to try and reinstall an e-certificate on my phone. (Without the e-certificate, I can't do any banking from my phone. With Korean online banking, it's never just about logging in to a well-encoded website; there's all these extra steps and doodads you have to deal with.) It took me several tries, tonight, to get yet another e-certificate on my phone (in fact, I eventually had to use my phone to get the e-certificate, not my desktop), but I finally managed to do it, and now, I'm ready to get the hell out of the office. Jesus Christ. I hate tax paperwork.



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