KUALA LUMPUR, April 9 — With the furore over service charges at restaurants following the Goods and Services Tax (GST), one tech entrepreneur took it upon herself to start a website listing outlets that impose both items on their bills.

Estelle Chang started check-service-charge.herokuapp.com as a resource for friends and family to find out what they can expect to pay at listed restaurants, but the site has since taken off with thousands visiting and contributing information.

“The site will allow us to know beforehand whether a particular restaurant charges service charge, in order to decide whether we would like to eat at that restaurant instead of finding out about it after we patron the restaurant and receive the bill,” Chang said in an email interview with Malay Mail Online yesterday.

Although the website only went live since last Thursday and publicised primarily on Facebook, it has already built a database that includes 450 restaurants.

Additionally, Chang said that the website has received up to 40,000 unique page views in just the last two days.

“It is so surreal to see so much response on my site since yesterday morning and very happy that so many people online worked together to build this list,” she said.

The website allows visitors to submit information about restaurants they patronise including whether the outlet charges GST, service charge, its GST account number as well as a picture of their receipt as a form of verification.

At this point, Chang vets submissions on her own and manually, either by looking at receipts sent in or by contacting respective restaurants, but added that she is working on devising a better system.

“I look at all the submitted entries and try to Google the restaurants to verify the information. I also cross check with receipts (photographed) sent by some of the users, family and friends. Eventually, we'll find a better way,” she said.

Although the verification process is a “challenge”, Chang said she found satisfaction in providing a sought-after resource.

“I am so happy to know that people are benefiting from this information. I think the fact that it solves a problem for most Malaysians in itself is the best reward for me,” she said.

Following the introduction of the GST on April 1, consumers began to complain of the customary 10 per cent service charge that restaurants typically add on to their bills.

Although the Domestic Trade, Cooperatives and Consumerism Ministry initially said such charges were unregulated, it has since announced that restaurants and hotel may only collect these if they are included in the collective agreements with employees.

The GST is a 6 per cent consumption based tax charged on all taxable supply of goods and services that replaced the Sales and Service Tax (SST) on April 1.

The government and economists say the GST will help address an inadequate revenue-collection system under which income tax is currently paid by only an estimated 11 per cent of registered companies and 14.8 per cent of employees.

But the GST has prompted protests by opposition parties, who said Malaysians were not financially prepared and made to pay for the government’s mismanagement of the economy.