On Sun, 25 Dec 2005 10:48:42 -0500 elefino <kevinmcl@magma.ca> wrote:
....
On Friday 23 December 2005 06:15, ken wrote:
A major website has soliticited ideas from the American public and requested comments and next month will ask the public to vote on the best of these. On idea which was mentioned on this list recently is listed here: <http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/idea/17324>. If you'd like to see tax software for OSS, then make your comments and cast your vote.
I'd love to see it OSS, at least to the extent of running on Linux... but, I'm not in "America" [for the purpose of this question, North America doesn't count], so it would be of little or no benefit to me.
Understood. Whether or not it would benefit folks outside the US would depend upon how the app was coded. I would think that a reasonably smart way to do write such an app would be to have a base executable that would read a file containing business rules and from that create the online version of the paper forms, i.e., something onscreen that the user would enter info into and would handle calculations and pulling up additional forms when needed. Keeping the business rules separate from the executables avoids a lot of issues: allows non-programmers to make the annual changes to the forms and allows the base executable to be (re-)used by different states, localities, and other countries.
In general, however, the problems with tax software are:
1) while it can have a common core, too much of it must match the specific tax laws/regulations and loopholes of the country in which you are paying taxes
See above.
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 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"?
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.
Kevin (in Canada, where our tax man doesn't speak IRS, and neither does our tax software)
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