The Dreaded M Form!!

Theme of this weekend: death by admin! Topping the list is doing our Dutch Tax Returns and tackling the dreaded M Form.

After much delay and having to request the forms again, they finally arrived. The size and thickness of the envelope itself was quite daunting! The M form itself consists of 105 questions and is accompanied by an instruction booklet of 103 pages – all in Dutch!  

Each question is in the format of a flow chart i.e. question, answer yes or no, follow the arrow to the next appropriate box and either fill in an answer or move onto the next question. Fortunately we were able to skip most of the questions; however, the tricky part is working out whether you have to answer each question or if you can skip it. So EVERY question was typed into the ‘translate’ function of Google. Generally Google translate is really helpful but you realise its shortcomings when you enter long complicated sentences and try to make sense of the garbled syntax and how it relates to you and your income. Fun times.

The Dutch tax year runs from 1 January to 31 December with returns due by 1 April. It is at least a bit easier to think about what you were doing in one calendar year rather than trying to remember what you did in parts of different years like how the tax period works in SA. Most of the questions were repeated twice, once relating to the period you lived outside of the Netherlands in 2011 and once for the period you lived in the Netherlands in 2011. That also helped to reduce the number of sentences we had to type into Google translate! Lol.

And then…. We were finished! Yay, we made it! And with our sense of humour intact, lol. It took a few hours but in the end we only had to fill out 9 of the 105 questions. Justin only needs to ask HR one question about his travel allowance and then we are ready to post the completed forms off well in time for the 1 July deadline =)

Sho, glad that is over! Still not sure what the story is for doing tax in the future, if we always have to do an M form or if we can do tax online in future, but now that we have done it once hopefully it will be easier next time! Huge thanks to Daniel, a colleague of Bronwen, who also recently filled out an M form and was able to give us some helpful hints n tips. Thanks Dan! You rock =)

Next task to tackle: US visa application! Woohoo! More fun times ahead! Not.

Congratulations to our friend Sue and Justin’s brother Brenainn who are both graduating from UCT this coming week. Enjoy it guys, you deserve it!

PS: Thanks for the 9000+ page views!

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The dreaded forms! How they arrive in the purple envelope on the left, the form in the middle and the information booklet on the right.

Working hard at filling in the forms

...... or not!

A snack to help ease the process! Yummy biltong and marshmallow Easter eggs  from the SA shop in London =)

Justin's bit: Today was game no. 2 of the cricket season for me. Today I played for the VOC 3rd team, the same team I played for last year, against a team in Amsterdam. A much better performance than last week which included a decent bowling performance and a knock of 38 not out to help guide the team to a 1 wicket victory. Sjoe, it was close! Looking forward to the rest of the season.