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The Friday 2005-01-28 at 19:58 -0500, Doug McGarrett wrote:
No, taxes are _not_ something you do in a spreadsheet. No-one does, not even the mavens you hire to do taxes. Without knowing every single tax law, and spending untold hours importing them into the spreadsheet, you cannot do taxes with a spreadsheet. And if you are sufficiently expert to do that, you name your program "Tax-Cut" or something like that, and sell it.
Hum. :-? Years ago, like 20, specialized magazine here (Spain) published spread sheets to do just that, taxes. At the time you had to fill the data manually on the forms (manually meaning ball pen), so it didn't matter that the programs didn't fill the forms at all. As I was too young and money-less at the time to fill tax forms, I can't say if they were any good. Currently, our goverment provides the necesary software: a standalone windows program, and a networked java version, that prints every thing, including the official forms, filled. Thus, there is very little market for companies to roll their own software. I have not seen open source projects, even smaller market. But our tax agency is somewhat linux friendly, they don't frown at you when we mention linux - they even reported on the use of linux browsers with them, which one worked and which didn't :-) -- even more, they cooperated with mozilla developpers (the crypto signing function), and have set up a dummy test site. Nice, isn't it? How about a form-filling engine, to use by programmers? Then it would only require to add each country rules to have a tax-filling program. It would serve for many other purposes. OO? -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson