Tax Time Part II

My tax return has been lodged, now to wait for 14-21 days for it to be EFT'd to my account. The e-tax program is really easy to use at least, and the phone manner of the people at the ATO (Australian Taxation Office) were really good. I didn't want to wait for my HELPS/HECS statement to come in the mail, so I called them up. The first person to pick up was called Zoe, really cute voice, very friendly. She couldn't process my request and passed me onto some indian accented lady (LOL) who didn't give me her name, but was very professional in providing me with the fact that I owe $33 657 to the government for my higher education... doh. That in itself is like the net salary of a grad student LOL. In any case, I also got my sequence number (it's like a reference number for tax returns) from her while I was at it because I hadn't had a tax return in 2007.

Back to the program and whoops, no date of assessment.... So back onto the phone and this time I got another friendly (but not as cute sounding) girl called Megan (well, that will be the spelling I choose since they don't exactly spell their names to you on the phone) who was helpful and provided me with the date of assessment details. Into the program, clickity-click, and voila, my return was lodged. 10:28:38am wow, talk about tax people being anal and even telling you the second it was lodged.... haha. Well, if it goes all to their calculations, I'll have about $1600 come back to me from my tax and that will go no doubt into paying off more bills while I still have no job. Woot.