FAQs about eTAX Technical Problems

You should be able to access eTAX services provided on GovHK by using popular operating systems (OS) and browsers on the market. To ensure smooth operations of the eTAX system and high security of the transactions, you are recommended to use one of the combinations of OS and browsers as listed in the System Requirements for GovHK Online Services webpage that have been fully tested for compatibility with eTAX.

If you use any of the following newly released versions of OS and/ or browsers which have not been fully tested on eTAX services, you may encounter compatibility issues and cannot complete the transaction smoothly and successfully.

Operating System/Browser Version Pending Completion of Compatibility Testing under eTAX

• Firefox 142

Please check the settings of your browser to ensure Cookies have been enabled.

Under normal operation, the buttons, address bar and the hot keys of the browser are disabled by eTAX. However, by some external means, these buttons, address bar and hot keys may be enabled again. Anyhow, you should never use these buttons, address bar and hot keys, as this will affect the normal flow of the application.

eTAX adopts Unicode 4.1 and HKSCS-2008 as the encoding standard for Chinese characters.  Therefore, client workstations have to support Unicode 4.1 and HKSCS-2008 in order to display the Chinese characters (including HKSCS) in eTAX.

For more information about Chinese characters and HKSCS handling under GovHK, please refer to:

FAQs about GovHK Online Services - Other Technical Questions and Trouble Shooting
Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS)

It is known that the HKSCS from Apple does not support the full set of Chinese HKSCS characters.  You may consult Apple for more details.

There are 2 possibilities leading to this situation: 

• When saving a page, “Unicode” or “Unicode (UTF-8)” must be chosen as the encoding scheme (Not applicable for Firefox) and HTML format should be selected in order to save the Chinese characters properly.
• There are some HKSCS characters that are out of the standard character set.  In this connection, eTAX will display these characters as image files.  However, there are some technical problems in saving these image files via a browser. In such case, you may consider printing the page instead of saving it.

It is known that some Linux distributions will encounter problem in installing the HKSCS modules.  You may consult your dealer to see if there is any alternative.

Under the character-encoding standard adopted by the Operating Systems, some Chinese characters may occupy 4 bytes instead of 2 bytes.  When these Chinese characters are inputted, some browsers will interpret a 4-byte character as two 2-byte characters. Hence, the number of characters that can be inputted is less than expected.

This might happen occasionally when the Internet traffic is too busy. Please try again. If this happens frequently, please consider waiting for an hour or two before retrying.

You may also encounter "Error 500" message if you access eTAX via bookmark stored in the browser . Please access eTAX from the link: https://www.gov.hk/etax

To help protect our environment, please consider retaining the relevant information by saving the e-notice.  If printing is really necessary, you should select "Shrink Oversized Pages" for "Page Scaling" under the "Page Handling" of Adobe Reader’s "Print" dialogue box so that the document can be printed in full. Once this option is selected, it will become the default option of Adobe Reader.

It is known that such a display problem may occur with Firefox on Linux. Please consider using other platform.

Please see https://www.gov.hk/en/about/helpdesk/faq/infosec/index.htm#q4

Please ensure you have allowed popup windows from “*.ird.gov.hk”.

Please try the following procedures to disable local file restrictions:

Step 1:	Confirm if there is a “Develop” Menu on the tool bar. If not, select “Preferences…” under “Safari”. Check (√) “Show Develop menu in menu bar” under the “Advance” tab.
Step 2:	Select “Disable Local File Restrictions” under “Develop” menu.
Step 3:	Restart Safari and login eTAX again.

When you use your browser to browse a website for the first time, the browser will store the information from the website as temporary files in its cache. If you go to the website again, your browser will load the website information from the cache rather than downloading it again from the website. Each time you revisit a website, the cache will check if there is any change so that it can provide you the most up-to-date pages. Sometimes the cache may load the older stored webpage instead. Therefore, you are advised to clear the cache and cookies periodically so that you can view updated information from the website.

In case you cannot use your digital certificate to login/ perform eTAX services, please try to clear the cache and cookies in “Settings” of your browser. And then close all the browsers and restart to access eTAX services.

This is common issues with viewing PDF document from a website. To solve the common PDF-display issues, you may refer to “Troubleshoot viewing PDF files on the web” of Adobe website below.

https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/cant-view-pdf-web.html

Some PDF reader software (or a particular version) cannot display some information (for example, Chinese punctuation marks) of a PDF document under eTAX properly. You can try to view the PDF document under eTAX by other PDF reader software (or other versions of the PDF reader software).  You can also request for a paper copy of the document from the Inland Revenue Department if necessary.

Since the system does not allow users to log into the eTAX service by opening a new window under the same browser at the same time, you will encounter “Error 800” message under the following circumstances:

1. there is another active eTAX service session in a window under the same browser at the same time; or
2. there is previous eTAX service session in a window under the same browser that has not been properly logged out.

Please return to the first window to continue using the eTAX service.

If you want to log in as another user, please log out the previous eTAX services / sessions or close all the windows under the same browser and try again.

To enhance network transmission security for online payment, effective from 24 May 2018, you must use an operating system/browser with TLS version 1.2 or above enabled when making use of eTAX services involving online payment.

The software component using iText software library is provided by third party. If required, you can find the source code and license in https://github.com/KntxBL

Because of mobile devices of different brands and models with different operating systems and browsers have their own features, you may encounter compatibility issues when using the electronic signature of "iAM Smart" to interact with "eTAX" services. To ensure the smooth operation of the electronic signing on "eTAX" services, please set the default browser of your Android phone to Chrome or the default browser of your iPhone to Safari.

To ensure that your account has been completely logged off, we strongly recommend that you click the "Logout" button at the top right-hand corner to exit the "eTAX" service. If you exit the "eTAX" service by closing the browser window or TAB only, your status of the "eTAX" service is still under "logged in" and the information in cache will not be erased completely.