With one day to go for tax payers to submit their income tax return, the LHDN’s propriety online system, eFiling has been malfunctioning and crashing down, as well as giving error messages. Tomorrow, 30 April 2008 is the deadline for submission of BE2007 tax form.

People have been swarming the LHDN offices for the past few days and even the system in the offices could not cope with high traffic demand. Many who thought they could have a better access in LHDN office were left disappointed.

“The system (right now) is no good. It takes up so much time. I thought doing it from the IRB office itself would be faster,” a user told The Star today.

A reader of this blog has also reported to encounter the a problem, having received the following message:

Server object error ‘ASP 0177 : 800401f3?
Server.CreateObject Failed
/2008-1/BE/indexx.asp, line 50
800401f3

CEO of LHDN, Datuk Hasmah Abdullah acknowledges the problem, even though the team has upgraded the 24Mbps internet connection speed to 60Mbps. The eFiling system is expected to continue facing a surge of heavy traffic between 10am to 6pm.

Cases of high spike of online visitors crashing down websites are not new. A month ago, the MalaysiaKini website experienced similar case with more than 1 million users trying to reach the website during the General Election night for result updates, causing the site to crash.

To date, more than 700,000 thousands have submitted their income tax return using eFiling, with the number expected to multiply by the end of the deadline. Yesterday recorded the highest number of online submission, which is 53, 686. LHDN offices in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor extends their operation from 8am to 10pm until tomorrow.