Ever since I became an independent software consultant, I can no longer depend on someone else to do these things for me. I had to learn to deal with my taxes.
Fortunately, there are people who are helping us. First is Loryfel's mom, who happened to be a lawyer. She's the one giving us legal advices and tips. Second is Ate Weng, she's the one doing all the accounting stuffs. She's also aiding us with our tax activities.
Together with Laila and Ate Weng, we embarked in an "enlightening" journey through Philippine taxation, red tape, bureaucracy and lunch breaks.
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1st stop was BIR Manila, where I should be paying my taxes. We got there around 10AM. I went to the comfort room before proceeding to the registration office. Their comfort room totally s*cked. It’s even worse than those shown in horror films. 2 urinals were labeled out of order, the other 2 were 'usable' but there was no flush.
We entered the office and gave our forms to the BIR officer. To our surprise, she asked for a PRC registration, a Mayor’s permit, or a DTI business registration. We told her that software engineers like us don’t have board exams so there’s no way we could have a professional license. Anyhow, that stubborn officer insisted that we obtain a DTI business registration first, so it left us no choice but to leave.
She advised us to go to DTI Buendia instead of the satellite office in Lawton since she thought it is going to be crowded there. We asked a couple questions regarding the DTI registration, and while we were discussing, she took my TIN and pulled some records from her computer, she discovered that I was previously registered in Taguig, so she told us to go to BIR Taguig first, to have my previous record updated and transferred to Manila. What the f*ck?
I was not really surprised by these. I knew something like that was bound to happen. But, just imagine what could have happened if she got lazy to check my existing record and just told us to comeback. :-?
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Our 2nd destination was DTI Buendia for the supposed “business” registration. As expected again, we were immediately fended off by the security guard while we were trying to find a parking space. He told us to go to DTI Lawton since they have implemented these distributed registration system to make it more “convenient” for people. Holy sh*t!
Since Lawton is out-of-way, we decided to skip DTI and proceed to BIR Taguig since the DTI permit probably won't be issued within the day.
We arrived at BIR Taguig around 11:16. They gave me some forms to fill-up. Then they made me go to 3 more stations for some verifications and signatures. We were lucky enough not to get caught with their lunch break, which would have probably cost us another hour. Actually, they were already on “lunch break” when we arrived, the officer who took my form even forgot where he left my form. Except for having a slightly better building than that of BIR Manila, everything else seemed to be same. There were a lot of employees but only a few were really doing something.
5 minutes before 12 Noon, I finally got my update form back. But the bad news is, it is going to take "at least" 5 working days in order for the transfer of record to the Manila server to complete.
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Our 4th destination was BIR Pasig, where Laila's records are located. Like me, she needs to have her record updated and transferred to Taytay, Rizal. But before that, we had lunch at Greenwich.
After we finished our family size pizza, we headed to the BIR Pasig office. Guess what? If the BIR Manila comfort room s*cked, the whole BIR Pasig office s*cked more. It was "absolute chaos". Several layers of men and women were in front of the BIR officers in a free for all filling or "piling" fest. Oh, they do give out number cards, it's just that no one is calling out those numbers.Impressively, Laila was able to work her way around the miserable crowd and completed the processing in under 30 minutes. We left the BIR office afterwards.
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Our 5th and last stop was DTI Ortigas (in front of Megamall). It seemed that our luck has completely ran out. When we got to the DTI office, they were having some technical problems with their system and so the processing was very slow. The guard told us that there is no guarantee that we could be entertained before the cut-off time. We decided to wait for 30 minutes, with that hopes that the system will be fixed soon, and to our disappointment, the line never moved (only people in front leaving). We decided to return on a different day. :(
While waiting, I "accidentally" discovered that they have an unsecured wireless connection in the building. Since we are just outside the DTI office, I assumed that it is coming from the DTI office. Not only that their wireless connection is unsecured, their wireless router is accessible as well. I "accidentally" opened the administration page of their router, but I was "kind" enough not to screw up with the configuration or change the administrator password. >:)
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To be continued...
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