Apparently there are no certainties in life aside from death and taxes.

I don’t know much about death since I haven’t done that yet but I definitely have tax experience and now I have even more.

In HK, it is not possible to leave the country permanently without clearing any outstanding tax. It’s necessary to make an appointment with the Inland Revenue Department (IRD), bring paperwork (it’s a government agency so of course there’s paperwork) from your place of employment as well as completing various other forms, generally about two weeks prior to leaving.

They calculate your tax for that portion of the year, you pay and they see you on your way.

If you don’t pay and subsequently leave the country, they track you down.

So I was curious what would happen if this situation was reversed.

Let’s just call it an experiment. It’s no secret that I like to understand how things work and I also like to do or say things to see what reaction follows. This is a classic experiment in cause and effect. It satisfies my curiosity and I know the likely outcome for next time I’m in a similar situation. There may not ever be a next time, but that is rarely the point of any of my experiments.

Sometimes they are for my own amusement.

I received my tax bill for the last financial year.

It wasn’t a number ending in a five or zero so I did the only rational thing to do, I rounded it up. It was an additional HKD1. Roughly AUD0.17 / USD0.13 / EUR0.12.

I figured it would be better sitting with the IRD than in my bank account earning minuscule amounts of interest which I’d only need to pay tax on anyway. That and I was also curious what would happen.

At the time, I figured they’d leave it sitting as a credit for my following tax bill since they knew I wasn’t leaving the country within the next two weeks.

I was wrong.

This is why experiments are so good.

What they did, was send me a letter to inform me that I had overpaid my tax bill by HKD1. They also sent me a cheque for that amount.

This experiment has confirmed a few hypotheses:

• wages / cost of electronic equipment are even lower than I thought in the government since how else could they justify sending a cheque for that amount?
• it is integral for the books to balance with tax monies in to equal tax billed.
• there is less concern for the environment and printing the letter and cheque than there is for the balancing of the books, particularly since this government department has an etax tool which is used to communicate with the tax payer. They could inform me of the same message and if the cheque was still necessary, it would be on a smaller piece of paper.
• they do track you down even when they owe you money.