3 Reasons I Think The Hong Kong Government Is Great!

I've been dealing a lot recently with the Hong Kong Government and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience and they frequently surprise me. This is heartwarming becuase it means that I feel that my tax dollars are being used to run efficient, friendly services.

This is in stark contrast to publicly traded companies like Three (Wikipedia) and PCCW (Wikipedia) who are horrible to deal with. I hate them!

Here are 3 things the Government have done to inspire these warm, fuzzy feelings.

Friendly Service

I have been applying for a work visa for an employee and the officer in charge of the case file was super. Very friendly; a pleasure to deal with on the phone and incredibly helpful at guiding us through the application process. We didn't have a huge amount of contact with her, but when we did, it was great.

Responsive

In my effort to reduce the amount of paper I receive, I thought I'd be a good citizen and sign up for eTax. This was thwarted by a technical error on their side (they didn't support my browser version)*.

I promptly emailed them, it was a Saturday, included a telephone number and recevied a call on Monday afternoon from their tech team apologising that I couldn't sign up and that my browser version would be supported in November. Brilliant!

Proactive

This is my favourite example. Last year I managed to pay my tax twice by mistake. I had set up a forward dated transaction in my online banking but had forgotten I had done this. I had another reminder set elsewhere to pay the tax bill and logged on and manually paid (if you were wondering how one does that).

When I realised my mistake about a week later, I gave the tax department a call. The voice at the other end informed me that they had spotted the mistake and had already issued a cheque for the excess and I should expect to receive it in the next day or two - which I did. Stunningly good!

I mean, it took Ikea 6 seconds to take my money and 6 weeks to refund it. A whole lot slower than our Government. I also imagine the same call to HR Revenue & Customs in the UK. I'm sure they would have been laughing down the phone for a week.

I'm sure that there are people who have had terrible experiences. So it goes, and I hope that you provide constructive feedback.

I have no motive writing this except that when you receive great service from any organisation...well, credit where credit is due. Great service is hard to get right and so far my experiences have been excellent. Long may it continue.

*Browser version was Firefox 3.5.3. They're currently only supporting version 3.1. From a technical standpoint there is no reason why this shouldn't be supported. I suspect it's a case of over-zealous standards enforcement. I was not going to try and argue it and was just pleased to see that it was on their radar to fix. Who needs to be in a rush to sign up to pay tax anyway?