As a law-abiding Malaysian citizen, I, together with 2 million others filed my tax return within days before the deadline. The e-filing was overall convenient although I had to wake up at 4.30am in the morning to avoid slow server problem as many other taxpayers were also rushing to file in their tax returns. This is a tremendous improvement from the pre-e-filing days when I either had to submit it a few days before the deadline or go to the LHDN office myself to meet the deadline.

As the amount of tax that I pay grows by the year, I become more incensed by the gross wastage of money by some of our decision makers. They treat our hard earned money as their entitlement spending millions on expensive overseas “lawatan sambil belajar” trips. Some even brought his family and maid to Disneyland under the pretext of learning how to run a theme park, while some others charged half a billion “consultancy” fee for procuring some expensive foreign made weaponry. And yet, we the rakyat, are asked to tighten our belt to weather the current economic downturn.

One way to avoid our money from being squandered by these scoundrels is to pay all of our tax in the form of zakat. Although I’m not sure how transparent the zakat institution operate, and how much of the money actually goes to the right people, at least we can be sure our money will not go into financing somebody’s shopping trip to Harrods or to some middlemen trying to sell expensive toys to the government. And you can give it to any zakat institution that you feel comfortable with. I myself have been contributing my zakat to the Kelantan Islamic Religious Council since 6 or 7 years ago. No narrow Kelantan-centric chauvinism here. I believe people from rural Kelantan need more help than people from urban Selangor or KL. Since I’m not contributing directly to the economic development of the state in which I spent the first 20 years of my life, this is my way of “repaying” it.