Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Thursday July 16 2009, Fred A. Miller wrote:
...
If it's open source, then someone should be able to make the changes needed for the US!
This has come up before. Tax preparation software, if it's to be more useful than just a generic spreadsheet, must embody the tax code, and that makes it very labor intensive to maintain and that labor takes the form of people who have considerable expertise in the tax laws reading and understanding the tax code and tracking the annual changes that congress makes to those laws.
It's just not the sort of thing that's practical for open-source software. Nor would I want to trust an amateur's encoding of the tax laws to guide the creation of my tax return.
I think I could trust something like this if it had a very public face and I had reason to beleive a lot of people kept an eye on it. Something like a GrokTax/GrokLaw plus wikipedia plus sourceforge plus nice web front-end to to the cvs or git repository. Perhaps a meta language or use some existing higher level language that would be especially well suited to express the tax code instead of straight C and anyone with an account can edit that part of the app directly right in the mediawiki interface just like any other wiki page. The ease of editing in the wiki interface, the ease of reading/understanding by using a special-purpose language for the core logic, should engcourage more eyes to to review it and find problems. The rest of the app can still be developed in whatever traditional language and using normal checkout/checkin/build/package/publish ala sourceforge. The GrokTax part comes in to provide public reference and help understanding the current (tax) code. Perhaps that can be a separate site and the tax code parts of the app can be peppered with links to the relevant bits on groktax? both the wikified parts of the code and groktax would have to have a feature to allow each little thing to have an associated discussion so toss in phpbb or similar in there... It all assumes a whole lot of people giving lots of their time, but the idea is the more effortless you make it to look at and edit, the more people will to do so. (parse that both ways) Certainly enough people are interested. It just requires a facility whereby a thousand people can each dip in and give a few minutes or hours of their time or particular expertise effortlessly. If that were true, you get a thousand hours of time and at least some of those from real experts even if all they do is look over what someone else wrote and then just agree it's ok or they make some change, or if they're not coders they can just describe a change in a comment/discussion that a coder can then implement. The expert ends up helping invaluably without it costing him much time or effort. Under that kind of system I would risk using the open source app. In fact... It seems to me that this is exactly a service the government should be supplying, complete with full time official tax code experts and programmers whose full time job is just to work on this site. The government should be making it easy for us to conform to whatever rules it wants us to conform to. I'd rather pay advisors and facilitators and result in more people willingly staying within the law than enforcement operatives and penal systems and result in more people having to be hunted down and their lives ruined. There should really be no market for TurboTax. It's a job the government should be doing right along and in parallel with writing tax code in the first place. And if expressing the tax code in software is too monstrous of a task for a government funded agency, then that simply means they should not have allowed the tax code to get so crazy in the first place. Making it a requirement that the same people that write and enforce tax laws also write a public and free web site that is guaranteed to be legally acceptable (ie: even if the site errors, if you used the site to file, then you are off the hook no matter what it did, however you may opt not to use it's output if you think it made an error not in your favor) then that would form a nice self-adjusting feedback system to keep the app/site working and the tax code reasonably sane. Further enhancements? A dynamic image on the main page that provides some sort of simplified graphic rendition of the overall app, and each year when new tax laws come out the entire thing is colored red and new stubs added (red) for new tax code that has no equal in the previous year. As people go through and look over the existing app code and square it with the tax code, chunks get marked green. The app is not considered usable until all parts are green. Each year may start out as a copy of the previous years app but other than that each years app is a seperate app that only applies to that year. So it's not like a normal app that just continually progresses. It's a sequence of distinct apps that each do a similar but distinct job, which is filing taxes for one particular year only, according to that particular years laws. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org