Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
In <200907161322.00011.rschulz@sonic.net>, Randall R Schulz wrote:
Nor would I want to trust an amateur's encoding of the tax laws to guide the creation of my tax return.
While there are amateurs involved in open-source projects, there are also plenty of professionals.
This may be true, but as to the feasibility/probability of getting it right, and the consequences thereof: My wife has prepared both individual and business taxes for clients for many years, both before and after she passed her CPA exam, and has tried many of the "industry standard" solutions, both those for professionals and those for the general public. And every year she finds that she must wait til near the end of the yearly cycle to file for her clients, because the software is still being corrected/updated right up to almost the deadline. Often they are subtle bugs, but often, too, they involve significant errors or changes. And US tax law makes you, the taxpayer, ultimately liable for any errors in your tax submission. And the preparer as well, if a professional is paid to prepare it. In light of that, and the fact that the big players have individuals dedicated fulltime to just tracing/testing and verifying last minute changes to the tax code, there is just no way to get volunteers to meet or beat that level of effort to obtain accuracy, quality and ease of use. There is simply no way to ensure that an opensource project could or would be able to muster that kind of deadline-oriented, detail-oriented effort every year. And there is little likelihood that any preparer, whether a business, an individual, or a tax preparer, would accept the liability for any errors that crept in due to the use of software that had not gotten those last-minute bugfixes and/or code changes. Added to all that, every few years, the IRS waits until almost the last minute, due to Congressional constraints beyond their control, before publishing the final version of the tax computations for that tax year. As much as I like Linux, I would either run a commercial package (where at least you can hide behind the idea that lots of people got a similar buggy program), or would hire a professional to take either my paper financial data or my computer files of my financial data, and compute my taxes from that data. The only way I see this working in Linux is either a government initiative that explicitly is required to be open source, or someone leveraging a Linux based tax solution into a commercialized version of opensource, similar to Tripwire, or perhaps Mozilla, where revenue for staff can be obtained on a regular basis. Because without individuals dedicated to both taxcode interpretation (the formulae per se are never published, just the legalese that was mandated by Congress), and other individuals dedicated to either some form of input table maintenance or code maintenance, it just won't "gel". Besides the inherent complexity of a wiki-based solution for tax formulas, what about the issue of how conflicting wiki entries will be resolved? Imagine if using Wikipedia had major financial impact on users, and there was no dedicated Wikipedia staff to research and resolve issues of accuracy, etc. Would you trust it at all under those circumstances? And do you trust Wikipedia (as opposed to using it as a form of sophisticated knowledge search engine that has to be verified independently), even as it is today? Build a Linux-based tax product that can be sold as an appliance, similar to firewall appliances, and that is cheap and easily networked for small offices (without technicians!) and if you make it cheap enough, perhaps, a very BIG PERHAPS, enough tax preparers would buy into it, once it reached a critical mass and was able to support a research and update staff similar to, e.g., TaxAct. And I can't imagine anyone being able to raise enough VC to fund the liftoff to that level of critical mass, not in today's world. To steal from Archimedes, there is no royal road to simple, easy to build and use, opensource tax software that is also accurate enough to avoid penalties and or lost deductions at a very high percentage of success. And if it isn't at least 99.99% right, with a bound on the size of errors as well (an impossible condition in itself), it is not a smart move. After all, when your competitive alternative can deliver this sort of thing for $20 to $40 dollars, and a tax preparer can and will do a decent sized small business for a few hundred dollars, where does the big savings come from that makes people want to switch? (And most of the cost is usually in the hand-holding and "shoe-box" organizing a tax preparer must do -- and that doesn't go away with Linux -- so the actual dollars of cost you could reduce are minimal. Sorry, but I think that that is one field of dreams that you could build, and still very few would come...if any, other than those committed to the project. Dan Notice: This communication, including attachments, may contain confidential or proprietary information to be conveyed solely for the intended recipient(s). If you are not the intended recipient, or if you otherwise received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately by return e-mail and promptly delete this e-mail, including attachments, without reading or saving them in any manner. The unauthorized use, dissemination, distribution, or reproduction of this e-mail, including attachments, is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org