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Serious question: Tax laws change constantly as do the amounts you need to pay. Accountants tend to use automated tools to calculate accurate taxes which they

by nickjj 5y ago

Serious question: Tax laws change constantly as do the amounts you need to pay. Accountants tend to use automated tools to calculate accurate taxes which they routinely pay yearly updates for. What is stopping an accountant who is also a programmer to release a tool which they feed in the accurate / up to date info from whatever tools they are paying for to produce an accurate tax return? It could be open source and donation based or priced at something that makes it a no brainer to use for everyone who isn't eligible to do free tax returns. I have to think they would make many orders of magnitude more money from this than charging their usual accounting fees to a small local group of folks but this is such a basic idea that there has to be something stopping them from doing it. Is this because of liability concerns around providing inaccurate numbers or is there a lot of manual work being done to calculate taxes that a tool can't accurately calculate on its own without a huge amount of domain knowledge?

nhumrich 5y ago
As a former employee of a company that was essentially trying to build the "turbo tax for accountants", we had over 200 accounts, 50+ software engineers, and still barely scratched the surface. (The project eventually shut down after burning through 25 million). The problem is that tax code is very very ugly. We had entire teams thar would specialize in a specific tax area. Even if you could codify everything, the amount things change from year to year is insane. Most accountants deal with a very small subset of tax law, and they send the rest off to specialist teams, like a big-4 accountant firm where a lots of things are done by hand or older archaic software that costs a lot of money. (Comparative to turbo tax). Even the small subset of tax law most people deal with, there are thousands of edge cases. And then, to top it off, the problem isn't really "calculating everything" but filling out the forms. Because the IRS expects PDFs.

by nickjj 5y ago

nhumrich 5y ago

As a former employee of a company that was essentially trying to build the "turbo tax for accountants", we had over 200 accounts, 50+ software engineers, and still barely scratched the surface. (The project eventually shut down after burning through 25 million). The problem is that tax code is very very ugly. We had entire teams thar would specialize in a specific tax area. Even if you could codify everything, the amount things change from year to year is insane. Most accountants deal with a very small subset of tax law, and they send the rest off to specialist teams, like a big-4 accountant firm where a lots of things are done by hand or older archaic software that costs a lot of money. (Comparative to turbo tax). Even the small subset of tax law most people deal with, there are thousands of edge cases. And then, to top it off, the problem isn't really "calculating everything" but filling out the forms. Because the IRS expects PDFs.