On Monday 26 December 2005 12:43, ken wrote:
2) OSS works fine for the programming part, but much of the expertise in tax software is knowledge of this year's (and it changes every year, in every country) tax law and accounting rules. So, you need OSS tax lawyers and accountants from each country that levies income tax.
Tax software need only provide an "electronic" means for filling in forms. It isn't necessary for it to provide legal counsel and accounting assistance. It might be nice if it did provide this kind of assistance, but it isn't required for the existence of tax software.
If all you want is dumb form-filling, you can do that via web. The tax department itself supports that. They even prompt you about a few basic deductions. The point is that they don't provide you with the in-depth scrutiny and presentation of options that you receive with good tax software. In the US and Canada, using a brand-name tax software is roughly equivalent to taking your receipts and statements to a franchised tax preparer (a big one around here is H&R Block). They'll likely find you more deductions than you would yourself, unless you've had training (either the software or the franchisee), but will provide less comprehensive and personal service than would your personal tax accountant or lawyer. If you want some interpretation built in, such that the system finds the majority of deductions, claims, etc. that are applicable to you, based on what you input, then you need to build in some expertise. The people who provide QuickTax and other big-selling tax software do employ tax accountants and tax lawyers to work with the programmers, ensuring that you _do_ get the value-added features that make the software worth paying for.
If somebody could suggest open-source solutions to those little problems, THAT would certainly be the greatest thing since sliced bread. In my country, I can count all the OSS tax lawyers and tax accountants on the fingers of one hand... and have five fingers left over.
What do you mean by "OSS tax lawyers"?
I mean pretty-much what it sounds like. You won't find a tax accountant or tax lawyer who will donate her/his expertise to the community at large. The closest you'll get is when one of them writes a book, but of course, any book on tax preparation is outdated by the time it's published... or else it consists of generalities. The mindset that causes a programmer to tinker with something, either to make a new function that never existed, or to fix-upgrade an existing tool/app and then to share that knowledge and the source code with others is somewhat like scientists [used to be]. That's very different from the mindset of a tax lawyer or accountant, who discovers a new trick or loophole allowing clients to protect some of their money... the lawyer or accountant is motivated to keep such professional knowledge very tightly held as a competitive advantage. You just will not see a tax lawyer or accountant volunteer to sit down with a programmer for a couple of hundred hours of pro-bono refining and tweaking of tax-software rules and functions. It goes against their nature and their training. A programmer or group of programmers can play with a software function or a driver, on-and-off for months, and they can build on what they and others have done. If they are, say, supporting a certain type of hardware (example, video adapters), they can pick a subset and draw a line in the sand, saying this is as much as we're willing to support for now. That's because people have the option to use their stuff or not, or to use it for limited functionality (like support for your video card, but without 3D?) or to wait until upgraded support comes along. Tax software operates in a defined window of time, and (within a country) is all-or-nothing. You can't sell a software that supports half the tax code for your country, but not the other half, just because the programmer has a day job and didn't have time this year. Instead, you have to get a complete product out, and it needs to withstand some fairly rigorous legal and accounting tests -- real-life tax situations and people's livelyhoods.
Now, HERE's an idea that you could conjure with:
Let's have taxation itself be OSS. No more of this leaving it to politicians and to the tax gnomes, hidden away in the bowels of the government. I'll bet it would take less than six months for taxation to be simplified and streamlined to the point where hardly anyone would ever need a tax lawyer or a tax accountant. Lifting that burden alone would free billions in our various economies. Let's hear it for the tax-Wiki! :-)
I'd be willing to have Linus Torwalds pick the people who devise the tax system and decide who and what gets taxed. He seems like a good guy who would select good people. But then I suppose that people here in the US would complain that the Constitution gives that job to Congress.
But does Congress get into the nitty-gritty formulation and workings of the regulations? Is it more Congress or the IRS that determines that the tax code can't fit in a slim pamphlet, but instead requires a well-sprung delivery truck to carry it? In Canada, the Parliament enacts the laws, laying out the direction and broad strokes, but the bureaucrats construct the millions of intricate and often contradictory rules, ensuring not only their own jobs, but the jobs of all those accountants and lawyers who interpret all that [largely unnecessary] cack.
Kevin (in Canada, where our tax man doesn't speak IRS, and neither does our tax software)
Count your blessings.
Um, you haven't met our tax man. He's just as bad as yours. It's just that he speaks a slightly different dialect. Worse, he considers what he does to be a "service". Services are taxed in this country... :-) I think that if you let a bunch of programmers and other smart, interested people have a whack at slimming and simplifying the tax codes (any country), they'd tend to refine and smooth it, as happens in OSS projects and Wikis. Instead of lawyers and accountants being overjoyed every time the tax gnomes added a new layer of confusion (because it represented more scope for their income), the ordinary people would lend their considerable might to cleaning out the confusion and contradictions and fuzzy areas. We might still get taxed, but it would be clear and concise and not require professional "interpretation". Kevin