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I worked on tax software and have seen these kind of efforts. Noble, yes. Short lived, yes. It’s relatively easy to make a free 1040 file. The real problem com

I worked on tax software and have seen these kind of efforts. Noble, yes. Short lived, yes. It’s relatively easy to make a free 1040 file. The real problem comes from all. The. Edge. Cases. 1) do you support xyz state? 2) what if I lived in multiple states? 3) what if i… And on and on. And it’s not just one and done. Every year IRS and states are changing their shit so you have to go thru and make all kind of updates and verifications every year. It takes an army to build and maintain. Generally not the kind of thing for open source (unless they’re paid). But then what’s the point? One may say it’s more transparent, but TurboTax etc are transparent with their formulas - you can check every box they fill in for you. I think the only thing that can really disrupt this dynamic are “free” commercial software (like credit karma now cash app), or government provided.

nn3 5y ago
Excel1040 has been around for quite some time, long enough to already have long crossed the "short lived" threshold. It avoids the state problem by not supporting states at all. It's done by a single retired person. I always donate a few bucks and I suspect he's making enough off the donations for it to be worthwhile for him. But yes eventually it might be abandoned if he doesn't find some successor, but so far it's very alive.
silisili 5y ago
Funny you mention that, the first time I tried to use Credit Karma Tax, either last year or the year before, they punted on me for having lived in two states. I agree with your sentiment, but not resolution. The truest resolution is in simplifying the tax code, which Intuit and co do not want. Edit to add: When CreditKarma gave up on me, I tried FreeTaxUsa. It sounds like a scam I know, but they are top notch, and cheap. Highly recommend.
- aorth 5y ago
  > Edit to add: When CreditKarma gave up on me, I tried FreeTaxUsa. It sounds like a scam I know, but they are top notch, and cheap. Highly recommend. Ah! I remember FreeTaxUsa. They have this silly verification thing in their signup. Your email address must be on an "American" domain. Mine is self hosted on some other domain and they literally say it's "foreign". Just checked again and it's still there. Hah... sigh.
  - mro_name 5y ago
    did you contact them on that? What does an email prove anyway?
    - aorth 5y ago
      Ah, I just checked my records. I contacted them in 2021-02. Their response was: > We prefer customers to attach email addresses from widely recognized providers for security purposes. Additionally, our servers have a hard time communicating with private email servers. > You may create a new email address to handle your tax returns through FreeTaxUSA with a major provider.
      - mro_name 5y ago
        thanks for asking them – it's really important to give feedback. Otherwise they just continue to not know.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    If getting an email address is too big a barrier for you... you might not be the target market.
- Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
  Honestly, the best solution for all of this is use the local CPA or Licensed Tax Preparer. No, I don't mean HR Block or chain tax preparers. I have my own and it is the best money spent since my CPA know the state and the federal taxes further than Intuit software (Intuit use dark patterns to take advantage of everything).
zakpatterson 5y ago
Open source can solve this problem. Any service you choose might be missing your edge case. But if you can see all the code and figure out where to plug in your edge case, then you can contribute it for all users in the future to enjoy. We've already seen people show up and implement features we hadn't researched yet. I encourage you to check it out.
- qzw 5y ago
  It’s not just fixing problems though. The tax code has changes every year, so the software must be updated accordingly, which is a lot of drudgery. Open source can handle drudgery if there’s a big, passionate community. So you’d need a lot of people who are passionate about the tax code and about OSS. I’d like to see that Venn diagram.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  The consequences of botching it are high, so taking commits from external contributors requires detailed and time consuming reviews. Further, people don't know what the edge cases actually are at scale. If I go do my taxes and it doesn't account for some weird thing, I simply don't know that this weird thing even exists in the first place to justify a PR to the tax service.
  - zakpatterson 5y ago
    Can you elaborate about consequences? You might not know the edge case exists, but out of all the people that have that edge case hopefully there is one that does know about it and can implement the fix. Also I'd be curious to know what edge cases you're thinking about. Many people just have a W-2 and a few 1099s. If someone has a complex business or some other concern they're probably at least partially aware.
- lbriner 5y ago
  I think this only makes sense to an outsider dev who thinks everything is relatively easy. Tax and accounting is definitely not. What happens if you fall under two different tax-breaks or if a payment was taken on a certain date which falls before or after a cut-off point? A lot of complexity, that the developers could solve but will not necessarily know how to handle. At least when you submit this to the relevant tax authority, they can spot alarms like this and decide in a reactionary way how to handle it, adjusting tax codes or providing rebates. There are just way too many things that change too quickly. That said, I am all for simplification but then you wouldn't need open-source software, you could just do it in a spreadsheet ;-)
EvanDotPro 5y ago
Around 2007-2008, as a "side project" I tried to build a web-based payroll software for a single state. Me and the developer I employed were able to get to 80% real quick, with ACH and everything. But as you say, the final 20% (edge cases) are nearly endless and ever-changing. Even a single state ended up being way too much for two developers.
- peteri 5y ago
  Way back when I wrote accounting software in the UK. I had a conversation with my boss about us writing our own payroll software so we didn't have to a pay a third party to white label their software. I then went and found out how many folks one of our competitors (a bit more mass market than us) had writing payroll software. The answer was it was a six person team just to keep up with the government changes every year. We never bothered any more with that idea. Payroll is surprisingly hard.
  - mgkimsal 5y ago
    I switched payroll providers a few years ago away from Quickbooks Payroll. They hosed up my stuff so bad I was dealing with the fallout for close to 2 years afterwards - overpaid, underpaid, refunds, fines, it was a mess. The new company I switched to did not allow me to do payroll on the days that I'd wanted. They only offered 2 or 3 options, none of which matched what I'd done before. "That's all we offer" was the reply. There've been a couple other 'restrictions' (lost flexibility) on some behaviors - nothing horrible, of course. I've no doubt removing some of that flexibility has reduced their overhead - there's enough changing regulations every year in multiple jurisdictions - keeping the main stuff under their control as simple as possible seems to have worked out for them. I've had... 4 years with them without incident, but 2 years of pain with QB before. FWIW, QB hosed up dealing with my state. Federal was fine, but they created so many problems with my state filings...
netcan 5y ago
>> Generally not the kind of thing for open source Hard to know in advance, if OS communities can do something well or not. There are examples of taking on pretty sprawling problems successfully. On multi Language, portability and such they can often beat the "armies."
- saberdancer 5y ago
  Yes, but the problem with taxation is if you are couple of months behind the change in regulation, you are in violation and depending on the country, you need to pay fines. It's easy to have open source project where the stakes are "bad translation" or something that doesn't result in fines or problems with IRS/law.
  - netcan 5y ago
    Same answer, I suppose. I take the point that this is complex, but that doesn't discard OS/community by default. It's not impossible that community built OS could produce software trustworthy enough to be widely usable. FOSS has played in high stakes arena successfully before. I would say that the point you and GP make demonstrate that "move fast and break" or "MVP" stuff can't be applied easily. That's not specifically something that impacts OS. It's just a difficulty of the space.
  - reidjs 5y ago
    That’s sort of the risk you take when using open source software in general. You can put in a PR to fix that edge case if you feel so inclined. In my experience the IRS can be surprisingly understanding about mistakes on your tax forms (ONCE you get a human on the line…). The question is, do you think the potential penalty will cost more than the tax software? It comes down to managing risk, and some people may prefer to take the risk, especially if they have relatively simple tax situations.
vimsee 5y ago
I feel like this is a kind of XY problem that could be solved theoretically by agreeing on a more streamlined tax-regulation. It will take away the ability to fine tune tax deducts and so forth, but in return we can more easily design software to handle our taxes. I find that not having this automated nowadays with the advancement in computing resources that we have at disposal today is surprising.
- umeshunni 5y ago
  Yes, software can be much simpler if the real world wasn't so complex. The reality is that governments use taxation as one of their tools to reward certain behaviors and population segments and to discourage/punish others. Simplifying taxation is taking that power away from governments. Why would any government choose to divest itself of those powers?
  - aniforprez 5y ago
    I don't think any other country does taxes as awfully as the US. Where I live, there's a government provided portal that has most of the stuff already filled from my employer. It gets "complicated" if I earn income from the side such as investments, contract work etc and even that is just a matter of filling forms on their website in a similar manner to how the author suggests filling fields in an Excel sheet and other fields get the values automatically calculated. If I have refunds pending, I pay nothing. If I have taxes to pay, it redirects to my bank, I pay my taxes and I'm done
    - umeshunni 5y ago
      Sure, but the US also generates about 40% of it's income from personal income taxes, compared to ~25% average across OECD https://files.taxfoundation.org/20210217111150/Sources-of-tax-revenue-in-the-United-States-compared-to-OECD-average.-US-tax-revenue-government-revenue-in-the-US-US-federal-tax-revenue-sources-of-revenue-in-the-United-States-2021.png https://files.taxfoundation.org/20210217111150/Sources-of-ta... from https://taxfoundation.org/us-tax-revenue-2021/ https://taxfoundation.org/us-tax-revenue-2021/ My guess reading this (and my experience growing up in India) is that many countries simply ignore income taxes (if you're the average schmoe with a regular job and salary, you pay taxes. If you are a business person of some sort, you simply accept cash, hide your income and pay no taxes) and the country makes for this shortcoming with a 20% VAT.
toastal 5y ago
Agreed with edge cases. Last year I tried using free (as in beer) and even cheap softwares, and they couldn't or wouldn't process for Americans abroad or have the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion exemption which meant they were all no-gos for me. Seems like the tax system should be drastically simpler. Most countries don't tax expatriated citizens. Even with exemptions you still owe for social security and Medicare. It sounds good since many people will want pension in retirement, but Medicare offers vouchers or exemptions abroad. This was likely the precedence used for “historically, we do not offer any healthcare services to those abroad” when asked if overseas Americans would get access to the COVID-19 vaccine.
- reidjs 5y ago
  That is not a typical situation for most Americans. You even knew that as an expat you were going to have to deal with some pretty nasty tax forms for no taxation on the first ~100K for FEIE. Just hire an accountant who knows how to handle that, or pay for the commercial stuff (I assume you did). OSS does not necessarily have to compete on every single feature to help the majority of people. I think as long as it’s clear about its limitations upfront it can be useful.
hyperpallium2 5y ago
> It takes an army to build and maintain Perfect for open source - if decomposable, so each issue can be dealt with in isolation (or many can). e.g. using a "plug-in" architecture of some kind. And somehow recruit non-dev folk - if you go to the trouble to understand some specific tax point, you often would like to share it, and also record it in some "easy to use" form, for next time (and a starting point for amendments). Maybe a "tax DSL", "business rules"? Or a user specs it, and a dev codes it?
- ghaff 5y ago
  >Perfect for open source Not really. The software as a whole needs to be verified across a wide range of everchanging rules, some of which are going to be a judgement call even among experienced accountants. Why would people be interested in working on this project? It certainly doesn't break any new ground. It's just a long and ongoing grind to implement tax code rules. If for some reason, I have a lifelong ambition to work on accounting software, I'm sure Intuit, SAP, and Oracle pay reasonably well.
  - hyperpallium2 5y ago
    You're right about verification, there'd be a lag for changes until they become settled. Some projects do have moving targets - like youtube-dl - but testing is simple, and it's only one thing. (BTW even court tax rulings can have dissenting judges, so some points are real uncertain) Many popular open source projects began as an open source version of something. e.g. linux. The structure of the software, to facilitate contribution, could break new ground. I think the most significant and difficult-to-solve barrier is making contributing accessible to non-devs.
- tobias3 5y ago
  The German tax system works this way. German authorities specify the rules in a DSL and e.g. https://www.elster.de https://www.elster.de is generated from them where you can fill out all the tax forms (also e.g. companies). Stuff that they already know can be pre-filled. Sure it would be great if that was Open Source, but it does its job this way as well?
bserge 5y ago
Why not just say "sorry, it looks like your situation is too complicated for us at the moment" to edge cases? Would still help many people.
ineedasername 5y ago
Disruption could also come from tax reform. Some countries don't make you figure out things on your own: That's a bit like making a shopper put in the correct prices on each item they're buying and penalizing then for mistakes. A "Price is Right" game-show version of a tax filing system. Some other countries just tell you where you stand because for the vast majority of people a standard filing is all that's required. In those circumstances, only the edge cases need to deal with complexities. In the US, everyone does. But I am of course pessimistic on tax reform since that general populace just accepts "oh yeah filing taxes sucks" at the same time that tax service providers lobby congress who, absent a strong outcry from their voters, just follow the corporate money trail.
- wahern 5y ago
  > Some countries don't make you figure out things on your own: That's a bit like making a shopper put in the correct prices on each item they're buying and penalizing then for mistakes. A "Price is Right" game-show version of a tax filing system. The U.S. doesn't make you do this, either. Most people don't itemize deductions. You just plug in the data from your W-2. The percentage of people itemizing was 30%, but with the Trump Tax Cut which capped state and local deductions (i.e. lowered the maximum allowable deduction, effectively increasing taxes on a large number of people) this was predicted to drop to 10%. If you're itemizing, you're in a minority of tax payers, and in most cases a voluntary minority seeking to minimize your taxes in a way that simply wouldn't be possible elsewhere. The U.S. also has one of the highest rates of voluntary tax compliance, and hypothetically that might have something to do with 1) ability to itemize and 2) having to sign on the dotted line every year.
  - kmonsen 5y ago
    Funny you should call it the Trump tax cut since mine went up substantially for the reasons you mention.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      If it went up for the reasons mentioned, it means that your (previousl) itemized deductions put you in a rather small percentage of Americans. Also an unfortunate group: rich enough to have deductions at this scale, but not rich enough to have wriggled out of a large chunk of tax obligations.
qzw 5y ago
> I think the only thing that can really disrupt this dynamic are “free” commercial software (like credit karma now cash app), or government provided. That’s why it was worth $7B for Intuit to acquire Credit Karma. They’re pretty aggressive about buying up potential disruptors.
- tzs 5y ago
  Intuit didn’t get Credit Karma’s tax filing business. That got spun off and went to Square.
  - qzw 5y ago
    They don’t need it. The danger was always Credit Karma’s users + the tax business. The tax business by itself means little. Spinning it off even makes the deal look better to regulators.
amelius 5y ago
> what if I lived in multiple states? You just pick the state that gives you the smallest tax.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  A state tax auditor just started drooling and they're not quite sure why yet.
- zakpatterson 5y ago
  Partial year residency is an annoying issue. This is not one of the ways we're solving it though!
cm2187 5y ago
Plus complex corporate taxation is one of these domains where the venn diagram of domain skills vs programming skills is completely disjoint. Tax specialists will model it in unnecessarily convoluted way in Excel, and the domain will be forever opaque to people who can produce software efficiently.
- U8dcN7vx 5y ago
  Then just personal. Yes business might finance development if business taxes were handled, so perhaps personal first or as an additional intention.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
The french initiative started in 2013 is still alive (last commit a few days ago), and passes the gov test suite (they keep in touch with our version of the IRS): https://github.com/openfisca/openfisca-france https://github.com/openfisca/openfisca-france The way we got this is interestingly twisted. French citizens requested the software used by the administration, and they managed to get it! But, it was written in Mlang, a proprietary language created by the french administration in the 90: https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang. Someone then decided to create an OCaml compiler that takes mlang and emits python: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07966 https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07966 As a result, we got Open Fisca. I now think there are other techs in the mix... A slide of the story: https://www.slideshare.net/Etalab/opening-up-the-french-tax-software https://www.slideshare.net/Etalab/opening-up-the-french-tax-... But I believe it should be mandatory for the state to provide the source of every softwares they use internally to manage our lives. Also a test suite to allow any citizen to validate their own effort to comply with the law. Just like laws should be published as diff of the previous laws, in a VCS repo.
- laurencerowe 5y ago
  This is great. Do most French people need to file tax returns? When I lived in Britain I only needed to file when I was self-employed and when I worked in Norway I got sent a pre-filled tax return. Now living in the US I need to file every year (both state and federally) even as a regular employee with all my income reported already reported to the government. It all seems to be an absurd charade. Attempts to reduce the bureaucratic burden are opposed by the tax return return companies who bribe heavily to prevent any simplification.
  - thr0wawayf00 5y ago
    It's true that tax filing companies lobby to prevent improvements to the tax filing system in the US, but this is also aided by political parties that argue against things like taxation in the first place, which is why there is no bipartisan support to address this issue. Keeping taxes hard to pay is an important carrot in keeping the public mad about having to pay them in the first place. It's governance through dark patterns.
ggrrhh_ta 5y ago
In most countries in Europe (not only in the EU) you can download the official software from the corresponding tax authority. In many places you don't even need to send hardcopies of most documents - at most some printed page with a code and your signature. You must of course keep all the documents on which you based your tax returns in case they ask you specifically for them.
- ggrrhh_ta 5y ago
  oh, I forgot to say, in some countries you even received them already filled in.
bregma 5y ago
I can't believe so many commenters here are crying out for a nannier nanny state where all of their financial transactions are monitored by the government and once a year they have to sign a paper agreeing that the government has watched them correctly. That flies in hte face of the usual comment torrent decrying centralized spying from any agency, government or otherwise. In the 40 or so years I have been doing taxes I have not once seen the amount deducted as taxes match the amount owed. After various deductions (retirement savings, medical expenses, charitable donations, political contributions, governmental program incentives, etc) and jurisdictional disagreements (employer in one province, residence in another), I and those I do taxes for always get money coming back. Requiring every financial (and otherwise) transaction I undertake to be registered with some central government authority to they can (in theory) correctly prefill my tax forms is anathema. Be careful what you wish for you might just get it.
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  The IRS already gets this information. They'll get even more with the changes to 1099-k reporting for transactions made next year.
- danShumway 5y ago
  Nobody here is asking for that. I don't know if you're just not aware of this, or what, but most of the data on your taxes is stuff that already gets reported to the government. There's no reason for consumers to fill out a W2 every year, the government as it exists today already has that data. The same is the case for a lot of investment information, it already gets reported to the IRS today. You don't need to build an expanded government surveillance program for the IRS to stop requiring filers to fill in information that the government already has. This has nothing to do with having a "nanny state", and everything to do with a coordinated campaign from bad-faith actors like Intuit to try and pretend that it's pro-freedom or pro-privacy or some crud to act like the government doesn't already have your W2.
OneTimePetes 5y ago
So what is actually needed, is to transfer law into a computer parse-able syntax, so that software can automatically update itself?
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Genuine artificial intelligence. Some of the tax rules come down to "humans argued in court, and another human decided between their two arguments, because the law on paper was vague or poorly constructed".
shkkmo 5y ago
TurboTax in made by Intuit which is an evil company that has long worked to make sure that the US tax code is unnecessarily complicated and prevented the government from providing a free alternative.
snackematician 5y ago
> I worked on tax software and have seen these kind of efforts. Noble, yes. Short lived, yes. I've been using excel1040.com for several years now (2017 iirc), and I think it's been around for awhile before that as well -- so I don't think it's fair to call it short lived. It's pretty amazing how thorough it is. Not perfect, but I found it much more comprehensive and flexible than the free/cheap version of Turbotax. That said, it is maintained by one crazy guy in Kansas. I doubt the project will survive after he stops working on it.
shireboy 5y ago
Came here to say this, except the real fix is to simplify the tax code. It’s like app dev - over the years has built up lots of bloat, some due to legit social interests, some due to back room shenanigans with special interests. Needs an overhaul and mass simplification, but pointy haired ones not willing to take on the project.

nn3 5y ago

Excel1040 has been around for quite some time, long enough to already have long crossed the "short lived" threshold. It avoids the state problem by not supporting states at all. It's done by a single retired person. I always donate a few bucks and I suspect he's making enough off the donations for it to be worthwhile for him. But yes eventually it might be abandoned if he doesn't find some successor, but so far it's very alive.

silisili 5y ago

Funny you mention that, the first time I tried to use Credit Karma Tax, either last year or the year before, they punted on me for having lived in two states. I agree with your sentiment, but not resolution. The truest resolution is in simplifying the tax code, which Intuit and co do not want. Edit to add: When CreditKarma gave up on me, I tried FreeTaxUsa. It sounds like a scam I know, but they are top notch, and cheap. Highly recommend.

aorth 5y ago
> Edit to add: When CreditKarma gave up on me, I tried FreeTaxUsa. It sounds like a scam I know, but they are top notch, and cheap. Highly recommend. Ah! I remember FreeTaxUsa. They have this silly verification thing in their signup. Your email address must be on an "American" domain. Mine is self hosted on some other domain and they literally say it's "foreign". Just checked again and it's still there. Hah... sigh.
- mro_name 5y ago
  did you contact them on that? What does an email prove anyway?
  - aorth 5y ago
    Ah, I just checked my records. I contacted them in 2021-02. Their response was: > We prefer customers to attach email addresses from widely recognized providers for security purposes. Additionally, our servers have a hard time communicating with private email servers. > You may create a new email address to handle your tax returns through FreeTaxUSA with a major provider.
    - mro_name 5y ago
      thanks for asking them – it's really important to give feedback. Otherwise they just continue to not know.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  If getting an email address is too big a barrier for you... you might not be the target market.
Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
Honestly, the best solution for all of this is use the local CPA or Licensed Tax Preparer. No, I don't mean HR Block or chain tax preparers. I have my own and it is the best money spent since my CPA know the state and the federal taxes further than Intuit software (Intuit use dark patterns to take advantage of everything).

zakpatterson 5y ago

Open source can solve this problem. Any service you choose might be missing your edge case. But if you can see all the code and figure out where to plug in your edge case, then you can contribute it for all users in the future to enjoy. We've already seen people show up and implement features we hadn't researched yet. I encourage you to check it out.

qzw 5y ago
It’s not just fixing problems though. The tax code has changes every year, so the software must be updated accordingly, which is a lot of drudgery. Open source can handle drudgery if there’s a big, passionate community. So you’d need a lot of people who are passionate about the tax code and about OSS. I’d like to see that Venn diagram.
UncleMeat 5y ago
The consequences of botching it are high, so taking commits from external contributors requires detailed and time consuming reviews. Further, people don't know what the edge cases actually are at scale. If I go do my taxes and it doesn't account for some weird thing, I simply don't know that this weird thing even exists in the first place to justify a PR to the tax service.
- zakpatterson 5y ago
  Can you elaborate about consequences? You might not know the edge case exists, but out of all the people that have that edge case hopefully there is one that does know about it and can implement the fix. Also I'd be curious to know what edge cases you're thinking about. Many people just have a W-2 and a few 1099s. If someone has a complex business or some other concern they're probably at least partially aware.
lbriner 5y ago
I think this only makes sense to an outsider dev who thinks everything is relatively easy. Tax and accounting is definitely not. What happens if you fall under two different tax-breaks or if a payment was taken on a certain date which falls before or after a cut-off point? A lot of complexity, that the developers could solve but will not necessarily know how to handle. At least when you submit this to the relevant tax authority, they can spot alarms like this and decide in a reactionary way how to handle it, adjusting tax codes or providing rebates. There are just way too many things that change too quickly. That said, I am all for simplification but then you wouldn't need open-source software, you could just do it in a spreadsheet ;-)

EvanDotPro 5y ago

Around 2007-2008, as a "side project" I tried to build a web-based payroll software for a single state. Me and the developer I employed were able to get to 80% real quick, with ACH and everything. But as you say, the final 20% (edge cases) are nearly endless and ever-changing. Even a single state ended up being way too much for two developers.

peteri 5y ago
Way back when I wrote accounting software in the UK. I had a conversation with my boss about us writing our own payroll software so we didn't have to a pay a third party to white label their software. I then went and found out how many folks one of our competitors (a bit more mass market than us) had writing payroll software. The answer was it was a six person team just to keep up with the government changes every year. We never bothered any more with that idea. Payroll is surprisingly hard.
- mgkimsal 5y ago
  I switched payroll providers a few years ago away from Quickbooks Payroll. They hosed up my stuff so bad I was dealing with the fallout for close to 2 years afterwards - overpaid, underpaid, refunds, fines, it was a mess. The new company I switched to did not allow me to do payroll on the days that I'd wanted. They only offered 2 or 3 options, none of which matched what I'd done before. "That's all we offer" was the reply. There've been a couple other 'restrictions' (lost flexibility) on some behaviors - nothing horrible, of course. I've no doubt removing some of that flexibility has reduced their overhead - there's enough changing regulations every year in multiple jurisdictions - keeping the main stuff under their control as simple as possible seems to have worked out for them. I've had... 4 years with them without incident, but 2 years of pain with QB before. FWIW, QB hosed up dealing with my state. Federal was fine, but they created so many problems with my state filings...

netcan 5y ago

>> Generally not the kind of thing for open source Hard to know in advance, if OS communities can do something well or not. There are examples of taking on pretty sprawling problems successfully. On multi Language, portability and such they can often beat the "armies."

saberdancer 5y ago
Yes, but the problem with taxation is if you are couple of months behind the change in regulation, you are in violation and depending on the country, you need to pay fines. It's easy to have open source project where the stakes are "bad translation" or something that doesn't result in fines or problems with IRS/law.
- netcan 5y ago
  Same answer, I suppose. I take the point that this is complex, but that doesn't discard OS/community by default. It's not impossible that community built OS could produce software trustworthy enough to be widely usable. FOSS has played in high stakes arena successfully before. I would say that the point you and GP make demonstrate that "move fast and break" or "MVP" stuff can't be applied easily. That's not specifically something that impacts OS. It's just a difficulty of the space.
- reidjs 5y ago
  That’s sort of the risk you take when using open source software in general. You can put in a PR to fix that edge case if you feel so inclined. In my experience the IRS can be surprisingly understanding about mistakes on your tax forms (ONCE you get a human on the line…). The question is, do you think the potential penalty will cost more than the tax software? It comes down to managing risk, and some people may prefer to take the risk, especially if they have relatively simple tax situations.

vimsee 5y ago

I feel like this is a kind of XY problem that could be solved theoretically by agreeing on a more streamlined tax-regulation. It will take away the ability to fine tune tax deducts and so forth, but in return we can more easily design software to handle our taxes. I find that not having this automated nowadays with the advancement in computing resources that we have at disposal today is surprising.

umeshunni 5y ago
Yes, software can be much simpler if the real world wasn't so complex. The reality is that governments use taxation as one of their tools to reward certain behaviors and population segments and to discourage/punish others. Simplifying taxation is taking that power away from governments. Why would any government choose to divest itself of those powers?
- aniforprez 5y ago
  I don't think any other country does taxes as awfully as the US. Where I live, there's a government provided portal that has most of the stuff already filled from my employer. It gets "complicated" if I earn income from the side such as investments, contract work etc and even that is just a matter of filling forms on their website in a similar manner to how the author suggests filling fields in an Excel sheet and other fields get the values automatically calculated. If I have refunds pending, I pay nothing. If I have taxes to pay, it redirects to my bank, I pay my taxes and I'm done
  - umeshunni 5y ago
    Sure, but the US also generates about 40% of it's income from personal income taxes, compared to ~25% average across OECD https://files.taxfoundation.org/20210217111150/Sources-of-tax-revenue-in-the-United-States-compared-to-OECD-average.-US-tax-revenue-government-revenue-in-the-US-US-federal-tax-revenue-sources-of-revenue-in-the-United-States-2021.png https://files.taxfoundation.org/20210217111150/Sources-of-ta... from https://taxfoundation.org/us-tax-revenue-2021/ https://taxfoundation.org/us-tax-revenue-2021/ My guess reading this (and my experience growing up in India) is that many countries simply ignore income taxes (if you're the average schmoe with a regular job and salary, you pay taxes. If you are a business person of some sort, you simply accept cash, hide your income and pay no taxes) and the country makes for this shortcoming with a 20% VAT.

toastal 5y ago

Agreed with edge cases. Last year I tried using free (as in beer) and even cheap softwares, and they couldn't or wouldn't process for Americans abroad or have the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion exemption which meant they were all no-gos for me. Seems like the tax system should be drastically simpler. Most countries don't tax expatriated citizens. Even with exemptions you still owe for social security and Medicare. It sounds good since many people will want pension in retirement, but Medicare offers vouchers or exemptions abroad. This was likely the precedence used for “historically, we do not offer any healthcare services to those abroad” when asked if overseas Americans would get access to the COVID-19 vaccine.

reidjs 5y ago
That is not a typical situation for most Americans. You even knew that as an expat you were going to have to deal with some pretty nasty tax forms for no taxation on the first ~100K for FEIE. Just hire an accountant who knows how to handle that, or pay for the commercial stuff (I assume you did). OSS does not necessarily have to compete on every single feature to help the majority of people. I think as long as it’s clear about its limitations upfront it can be useful.

hyperpallium2 5y ago

> It takes an army to build and maintain Perfect for open source - if decomposable, so each issue can be dealt with in isolation (or many can). e.g. using a "plug-in" architecture of some kind. And somehow recruit non-dev folk - if you go to the trouble to understand some specific tax point, you often would like to share it, and also record it in some "easy to use" form, for next time (and a starting point for amendments). Maybe a "tax DSL", "business rules"? Or a user specs it, and a dev codes it?

ghaff 5y ago
>Perfect for open source Not really. The software as a whole needs to be verified across a wide range of everchanging rules, some of which are going to be a judgement call even among experienced accountants. Why would people be interested in working on this project? It certainly doesn't break any new ground. It's just a long and ongoing grind to implement tax code rules. If for some reason, I have a lifelong ambition to work on accounting software, I'm sure Intuit, SAP, and Oracle pay reasonably well.
- hyperpallium2 5y ago
  You're right about verification, there'd be a lag for changes until they become settled. Some projects do have moving targets - like youtube-dl - but testing is simple, and it's only one thing. (BTW even court tax rulings can have dissenting judges, so some points are real uncertain) Many popular open source projects began as an open source version of something. e.g. linux. The structure of the software, to facilitate contribution, could break new ground. I think the most significant and difficult-to-solve barrier is making contributing accessible to non-devs.
tobias3 5y ago
The German tax system works this way. German authorities specify the rules in a DSL and e.g. https://www.elster.de https://www.elster.de is generated from them where you can fill out all the tax forms (also e.g. companies). Stuff that they already know can be pre-filled. Sure it would be great if that was Open Source, but it does its job this way as well?

bserge 5y ago

Why not just say "sorry, it looks like your situation is too complicated for us at the moment" to edge cases? Would still help many people.

ineedasername 5y ago

Disruption could also come from tax reform. Some countries don't make you figure out things on your own: That's a bit like making a shopper put in the correct prices on each item they're buying and penalizing then for mistakes. A "Price is Right" game-show version of a tax filing system. Some other countries just tell you where you stand because for the vast majority of people a standard filing is all that's required. In those circumstances, only the edge cases need to deal with complexities. In the US, everyone does. But I am of course pessimistic on tax reform since that general populace just accepts "oh yeah filing taxes sucks" at the same time that tax service providers lobby congress who, absent a strong outcry from their voters, just follow the corporate money trail.

wahern 5y ago
> Some countries don't make you figure out things on your own: That's a bit like making a shopper put in the correct prices on each item they're buying and penalizing then for mistakes. A "Price is Right" game-show version of a tax filing system. The U.S. doesn't make you do this, either. Most people don't itemize deductions. You just plug in the data from your W-2. The percentage of people itemizing was 30%, but with the Trump Tax Cut which capped state and local deductions (i.e. lowered the maximum allowable deduction, effectively increasing taxes on a large number of people) this was predicted to drop to 10%. If you're itemizing, you're in a minority of tax payers, and in most cases a voluntary minority seeking to minimize your taxes in a way that simply wouldn't be possible elsewhere. The U.S. also has one of the highest rates of voluntary tax compliance, and hypothetically that might have something to do with 1) ability to itemize and 2) having to sign on the dotted line every year.
- kmonsen 5y ago
  Funny you should call it the Trump tax cut since mine went up substantially for the reasons you mention.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    If it went up for the reasons mentioned, it means that your (previousl) itemized deductions put you in a rather small percentage of Americans. Also an unfortunate group: rich enough to have deductions at this scale, but not rich enough to have wriggled out of a large chunk of tax obligations.

qzw 5y ago

> I think the only thing that can really disrupt this dynamic are “free” commercial software (like credit karma now cash app), or government provided. That’s why it was worth $7B for Intuit to acquire Credit Karma. They’re pretty aggressive about buying up potential disruptors.

tzs 5y ago
Intuit didn’t get Credit Karma’s tax filing business. That got spun off and went to Square.
- qzw 5y ago
  They don’t need it. The danger was always Credit Karma’s users + the tax business. The tax business by itself means little. Spinning it off even makes the deal look better to regulators.

amelius 5y ago

> what if I lived in multiple states? You just pick the state that gives you the smallest tax.

ceejayoz 5y ago
A state tax auditor just started drooling and they're not quite sure why yet.
zakpatterson 5y ago
Partial year residency is an annoying issue. This is not one of the ways we're solving it though!

cm2187 5y ago

Plus complex corporate taxation is one of these domains where the venn diagram of domain skills vs programming skills is completely disjoint. Tax specialists will model it in unnecessarily convoluted way in Excel, and the domain will be forever opaque to people who can produce software efficiently.

U8dcN7vx 5y ago
Then just personal. Yes business might finance development if business taxes were handled, so perhaps personal first or as an additional intention.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

The french initiative started in 2013 is still alive (last commit a few days ago), and passes the gov test suite (they keep in touch with our version of the IRS): https://github.com/openfisca/openfisca-france https://github.com/openfisca/openfisca-france The way we got this is interestingly twisted. French citizens requested the software used by the administration, and they managed to get it! But, it was written in Mlang, a proprietary language created by the french administration in the 90: https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang. Someone then decided to create an OCaml compiler that takes mlang and emits python: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07966 https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07966 As a result, we got Open Fisca. I now think there are other techs in the mix... A slide of the story: https://www.slideshare.net/Etalab/opening-up-the-french-tax-software https://www.slideshare.net/Etalab/opening-up-the-french-tax-... But I believe it should be mandatory for the state to provide the source of every softwares they use internally to manage our lives. Also a test suite to allow any citizen to validate their own effort to comply with the law. Just like laws should be published as diff of the previous laws, in a VCS repo.

laurencerowe 5y ago
This is great. Do most French people need to file tax returns? When I lived in Britain I only needed to file when I was self-employed and when I worked in Norway I got sent a pre-filled tax return. Now living in the US I need to file every year (both state and federally) even as a regular employee with all my income reported already reported to the government. It all seems to be an absurd charade. Attempts to reduce the bureaucratic burden are opposed by the tax return return companies who bribe heavily to prevent any simplification.
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  It's true that tax filing companies lobby to prevent improvements to the tax filing system in the US, but this is also aided by political parties that argue against things like taxation in the first place, which is why there is no bipartisan support to address this issue. Keeping taxes hard to pay is an important carrot in keeping the public mad about having to pay them in the first place. It's governance through dark patterns.

ggrrhh_ta 5y ago

In most countries in Europe (not only in the EU) you can download the official software from the corresponding tax authority. In many places you don't even need to send hardcopies of most documents - at most some printed page with a code and your signature. You must of course keep all the documents on which you based your tax returns in case they ask you specifically for them.

ggrrhh_ta 5y ago
oh, I forgot to say, in some countries you even received them already filled in.

bregma 5y ago

I can't believe so many commenters here are crying out for a nannier nanny state where all of their financial transactions are monitored by the government and once a year they have to sign a paper agreeing that the government has watched them correctly. That flies in hte face of the usual comment torrent decrying centralized spying from any agency, government or otherwise. In the 40 or so years I have been doing taxes I have not once seen the amount deducted as taxes match the amount owed. After various deductions (retirement savings, medical expenses, charitable donations, political contributions, governmental program incentives, etc) and jurisdictional disagreements (employer in one province, residence in another), I and those I do taxes for always get money coming back. Requiring every financial (and otherwise) transaction I undertake to be registered with some central government authority to they can (in theory) correctly prefill my tax forms is anathema. Be careful what you wish for you might just get it.

mkr-hn 5y ago
The IRS already gets this information. They'll get even more with the changes to 1099-k reporting for transactions made next year.
danShumway 5y ago
Nobody here is asking for that. I don't know if you're just not aware of this, or what, but most of the data on your taxes is stuff that already gets reported to the government. There's no reason for consumers to fill out a W2 every year, the government as it exists today already has that data. The same is the case for a lot of investment information, it already gets reported to the IRS today. You don't need to build an expanded government surveillance program for the IRS to stop requiring filers to fill in information that the government already has. This has nothing to do with having a "nanny state", and everything to do with a coordinated campaign from bad-faith actors like Intuit to try and pretend that it's pro-freedom or pro-privacy or some crud to act like the government doesn't already have your W2.

OneTimePetes 5y ago

So what is actually needed, is to transfer law into a computer parse-able syntax, so that software can automatically update itself?

ceejayoz 5y ago
Genuine artificial intelligence. Some of the tax rules come down to "humans argued in court, and another human decided between their two arguments, because the law on paper was vague or poorly constructed".

shkkmo 5y ago

TurboTax in made by Intuit which is an evil company that has long worked to make sure that the US tax code is unnecessarily complicated and prevented the government from providing a free alternative.

snackematician 5y ago

> I worked on tax software and have seen these kind of efforts. Noble, yes. Short lived, yes. I've been using excel1040.com for several years now (2017 iirc), and I think it's been around for awhile before that as well -- so I don't think it's fair to call it short lived. It's pretty amazing how thorough it is. Not perfect, but I found it much more comprehensive and flexible than the free/cheap version of Turbotax. That said, it is maintained by one crazy guy in Kansas. I doubt the project will survive after he stops working on it.

shireboy 5y ago

Came here to say this, except the real fix is to simplify the tax code. It’s like app dev - over the years has built up lots of bloat, some due to legit social interests, some due to back room shenanigans with special interests. Needs an overhaul and mass simplification, but pointy haired ones not willing to take on the project.