I wasn’t participating in a quest or struggling to find my Uber. Instead, I was trying to get a basic service from the tax office, and, strangely, it required finding the damn car.
But let’s start from the beginning.
Four hours earlier, I entered a tax office on Zhylyanska Street in central Kyiv. I needed a new electronic key – a digital signature that one uses to file tax documents online. My old key has expired. Getting a new one is a simple procedure that usually took me around 15 minutes.
I must confess, I haven’t suffered from bureaucracy too much in my life. Sure, I had my share of waiting in lines, collecting pointless certificates and so on. Once, I spent a night trying to make the office printer produce a copy of my passport in a very precise way – a two-sided copy with two spreads on each side, all the blank pages included – for a visa application. I’m ashamed to think of how much paper I wasted.
Other than that, I was fine. Until I entered the tax office at 12:11 p.m. this Monday.
You wonder how I remember the time so precisely? I know it because it was printed on my electronic queue ticket. Of course, the ticket turned out to be worthless, because the tax office wasn’t using the electronic queue system, despite the working ticket machine standing right there.
Still, I felt safe. I had a form that was filled out in advance, and a collection of all the required copies: one of my passport and one of my taxpayer’s ID. These are required in almost any operation in this country, and it’s a mystery to me since all the data in them can be looked up in a second. I think it’s a national-level conspiracy aimed at destroying all the trees that are left.
The line to get an electronic key numbered six or seven people, which seemed fine. When in the next hour, only one of them managed to get the key, I was surprised, but thought that maybe it was an especially difficult customer. My optimism was irrational.
When a 1 p.m. lunch break started, I’ve got another warning. A surprisingly rude guard started driving everyone outside.
“You’re going to do what I tell you to do!” he shouted to an elder woman who wanted to stay in, saying she wasn’t feeling well.
In 45 minutes, when they let us back in, there was already a customer in the inspector’s office. Someone from the tax office let him in during the lunch break so that he wouldn’t have to wait in line with us, mere mortals.
It took him 55 minutes to get the key.
I finally called a hotline to complain. Their number was hanging on a wall. But they weren’t taking complaints and didn’t know who was.
There was no way I was going to get into the key-issuing office by the end of the day, but then a miracle happened – three people before me left. In a tribal victory dance, I rolled into the inspector’s office. I’ve won, I’ve won. The bureaucratic system lost, and I’ve won.
The inspector put me in my place at once. My application was wrong. The mistake was huge: It had “Dnipropetrovsk” as my hometown instead of “Dnipro” – it was renamed earlier this year.
There is no such thing as correcting the application, so I could forget about simply crossing out the “-petrovsk” part. I had to redo the whole thing.
But for that, I needed a new form.
Surely, you think, there must be a stack of spare forms in a tax office, where people use them all the time. Nope, there isn’t. There isn’t a single spare form in the whole office.
It’s also impossible to print it out there. I asked, I asked really persistently. For security reasons, their computers aren’t connected to the internet, and they can’t read a flash drive. Or so I was told.
After some begging, the administrator said she could copy the form for me, if I brought her a sample to make a copy of. One of my comrades in misery from the line happened to have a yet unfilled form.
I rushed to make a copy and started filling it out. But what’s that? That field wasn’t there before. Damn it, it’s a form for the wrong type of a taxpayer.
I faced a perspective of going back to my office, printing out the form and returning tomorrow, losing one more day in the line. I was terrified.
“Find a brown Nissan that is parked outside,” the administrator at the tax office told me. “You can get a form there.”
“What?” I asked, bewildered. “Where?”
There were dozens of cars outside.
“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging in a way that suggested that she knew but thought that giving a detailed instruction could make it look like she had something to do with the car.
That’s where you found me earlier – looking for the Nissan. For the sake of pure absurdity, there happened to be three brown Nissans outside. Finally, I found the one I needed. A sign on its windshield read “Accountant forms for sale.”
A man in his 50s charged me only Hr 2 for the form that he fished out from a stack of marked folders that took up the SUV’s whole back seat. The business model of this venture remained a mystery to me. Could this man be supporting himself by this meager trade? Did he buy this expensive car from the proceeds from selling forms to forgetful customers of the tax office? If so, what was it before – “a blue Chevrolet”? Or perhaps even “a rusty bike”?
He must have been doing this for a while. The people in my line knew about him, too.
“Just get it from the brown Nissan,” one man told me when I was running back and forth asking for a spare form.
Happy, I filled out the purchased form and gave it to the inspector. I’ve won this time, surely?
“Oh no,” she sighed.
I froze. “What?”
“This is an old form,” she said.
The Nissan guy sold me a bill of goods. His form was outdated. Now I needed a new one, again. I started to believe I’ll never get out of this circle. I was a modern-day Sisyphus, filing the wrong forms over and over.
The inspector was a kind woman. She uploaded the new forms to my flash drive and instructed me how to find the closest printing center, two blocks away.
“They aren’t really any different from the old forms. They are just… new,” she slipped, and I began feeling pounding in my head.
In 4.5 hours, I’ve got my key. The actual process of assigning the key took about five minutes.
All the rest was fixing the forms and waiting till other people fix their forms. Everyone in the line lost half a day of work, and the sole reason was – there were no spare forms in the tax office, or a computer that could print them out.
Not a single person in that office was interested in making it work more effectively, or in providing a better service to the people.
Moreover, most of them treated customers like shit, even though they are technically the ones paying their salaries. And you don’t treat your boss like shit.
A lot still needs to be made to improve this service. Why don’t we begin with getting a damn printer instead of the brown Nissan?
