16 ms·

> if you let this kind of fuck-up go undetected for over three months, you have to at least assume some of the blame and acknowledge that you probably could hav

by throwaway2016a 5y ago

> if you let this kind of fuck-up go undetected for over three months, you have to at least assume some of the blame and acknowledge that you probably could have caught it if you scrutinized transactions. I work in eCommerce and occasionally there will be something like a script or config gets messed up and an issue with billing will happen. And being the "expert" I'm usually the one called to fix it. I wish I could count the number of tense discussions I have had that are along the lines of: Them: We haven't been charging tax in Canada for three months because the config was wrong. Fix it! Me: (some more polite variant of) So just to confirm, this has been wrong in your ERP... hundreds of thousands of CAD of uncollected VAT... for 3 months and you're just now noticing? It is, unfortunately, an extremely common discussion. That or some close variant of.

graderjs 5y ago
It's funny that, with the importance of tax to government revenue, why do governments not make a habit of funding/creating really high quality tax software for businesses/individuals to use? Increases in collection efficiency have historically been associated with growth of the state coffers (and state's whose bureacracies failed to adequately capture tax had to resort to funding themselves in other ways, frequently in the past through "expansionist tendencies", ie, war--for territory, resources etc...which then only works if you can pay for soldiers and equipment). Not that governments seem great at making software (in general), but with something so critical, a focus on this seems like a "sort of" low-hanging fruit...
- wildmanx 5y ago
  > It's funny that, with the importance of tax to government revenue, why do governments not make a habit of funding/creating really high quality tax software for businesses/individuals to use? Because there is a strong lobby that prevents it. https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f... Money has too strong a foothold in American politics. (In other countries too, but especially in the land of the free.)
  - graderjs 5y ago
    Ah yes I heard about this tax software lobby before. It's weird in this case since it's like "money fighting money" haha
  - alistairSH 5y ago
    Not just the “TurboTax” lobby, but also a strong contingent of anti-tax conservatives. One of their approaches to gain sympathy to their cause is to keep making taxes hard. If taxes are hard, the general population will want less of them.
    - JackFr 5y ago
      That's not fully true. There is also a contingent of people who like to use the the tax code as a mechanism of policy apart from efficient collection of revenue. Tax credits for education, clean energy, penalties, small businesses, mortage interest, each one of those one-off changes adds complexity, and in total ultimately can make the process dramatically more difficult.
      - samatman 5y ago
        While all of this is true, other countries have a system where the government tells you what tax they believe you owe, and provide the details of how they reached this number. The citizen can either pay that number, or offer amendments to the details which imply a lower rate (or higher if you're a masochist, I suppose). That's independent of the complexity of how that number is derived, and in balance I would rather the US (as a citizen thereof) use this sort of system than the one we happen to have.
        yencabulator 5y ago
        One thing to add: You're typically still obligated to file a return if the prepared taxes are not correct. You're not "off the hook" in any way by accepting what the prepared statement says. This mostly bites e.g. entrepreneurs with more complicated taxes, especially if you filed for an extension on the business side.
- refurb 5y ago
  Not sure how software is going to always find "...credit card fraud, internal theft, mis-priced items, mistakes....". I don't care how good AI in finding tumors in x-rays is, I still want a set of skilled eyes to confirm findings. It's the same reason I double check all my paychecks to make sure I'm paid the right amount and the deductions are correct. All of it's automated on the backend, but it's still my money and worth double-checking.
  - graderjs 5y ago
    No I wasn't thinking it's a replacement, not 'directly' replying to the ancestor, just riffing on the idea. :)
- HWR_14 5y ago
  > why do governments not make a habit of funding/creating really high quality tax software for businesses/individuals to use? They do. We can leave aside the practice in many European countries to compute your income taxes for you, based on reporting by your employer and financial services. Even in the US, high quality software is provided for sales tax compliance. In fact, according to the Supreme Court, the presence of that software is one of the main reason they overturned their "no interstate online sales tax" decision in 2018. One reason was > Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement. This system standardizes taxes to reduce administrative and compliance costs: It requires a single, state-level tax administration, uniform definitions of products and services, simplified tax rate structures, and other uniform rules. It also provides sellers access to sales tax administration software paid for by the State. Sellers who choose to use such software are immune from audit liability. Which, I guess to return to the point we set aside, is because companies can lobby for public software for their benefit, but tax prep companies can lobby against public software for their benefit.
- wil421 5y ago
  I have enough experience with local and federal government that there is no way I want them to build any kind of software. Much less a complicated tax software. It might work in the EU but in the US there’s state/county/municipality taxes that can get quite complicate. My zip code has a small area in my county and my county is at a 6% tax rate. Most of the zip code is another county that has a %7.5 tax rate. I have to double check large online purchases just to make sure it’s correct. Almost every place shows the wrong tax at checkout due to using my zip but’s it’s always fixed when my card is actually charged. Most people are using SAP or Oracle to do this kind of thing because they already know the ins and outs of tax locales.
  - YawningAngel 5y ago
    If the tax law is so complex that the government can't correctly implement tax software, how is the government going to collect the taxes?
    - SteveNuts 5y ago
      They pour the resources and money into the enforcement side instead of the collection side.
    - snovv_crash 5y ago
      It's often easier to evaluate compliance than it is to engineer a compliant system.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      The software would have to work everywhere. The tax collections (review/enforcement, really) process only has to work in one place. Tax law in one place is usually clear enough; the complexity is in the aggregate. My state doesn’t have to give a rip that NYC has a city surtax on this but not that, or that some other jurisdiction treats clothing items up to $100 as non-taxable while we put the limit at $175.
    - wil421 5y ago
      The federal government is only one part of it. States, counties, and cities can also impose their own income taxes or sales tax. Or like Florida they can choose not to have an income tax. I suppose that would be like asking the EU commission to provide tax software for all its member states.
- giaour 5y ago
  > why do governments not make a habit of funding/creating really high quality tax software for businesses/individuals to use? In the US, jurisdictional/funding issues are the biggest blocker. There is no federal sales tax, so the IRS can't use its budget to pay for this. State agencies are not going to be able to use their funds to pay developers to add functionality for a different jurisdiction, and ditto for counties/cities/special districts, which tend to have much smaller budgets anyways. The best avenue would probably be something like ITOR (the funds that give USDS its wide remit to help any gov agency with their tech needs), but states and localities aren't always open to receiving this kind of help. (It did happen with unemployment programs during the pandemic, but the lawyers had to lawyer pretty hard to make that possible.)
  - giaour 5y ago
    That said, congress could fund this tomorrow if they wanted. Budgetary concerns apply to executive actions in this arena, but the whole idea sounds like it's necessary and proper for smooth interstate commerce.
- dikaio 5y ago
  Government made software… I imagine yearly or bi-yearly updates, horrendous UI/UX, count me out.
  - chrissnell 5y ago
    That’s honestly only a small part of why I would never want this. More significant, for me, is that this TaxSoftware.gov idea would mean literally thousands more employees on the government payroll, being ineffectual, slow, and bureaucratic. And when their government career is finally over, those people will all take home government pensions, as will their future replacements. Once you create more government, it will never end and will never go away. “The only thing government is good at is creating more government.” - P.J. O’Rourke
zerkten 5y ago
This applies to every industry and consequential process unfortunately. Take something like GDPR deletion requests. Many mid-to-large organizations have automated flows setup to purge accounts after users make requests after very detailed planning with legal and compliance teams. Companies assume this is the end of it and that they don't have to audit and perform maintenance at the engineering team level because it's something that someone in support or another team shoved off the side will own. What you find is one time it's not purging file uploads, other times it's not purging user PII, etc. This all comes back to how poorly we integrate the solutions we build. The position of engineers is such that a free pass is often given for failures like these that are fairly well obscured from view. Similar failures for different roles within the same companies get treated differently. While engineers hold outsized power, it is very difficult to completely address these issues.
Dwolb 5y ago
This tells me we have a long way to go to increase business intelligence literacy in companies. Not sure a ton realize that data is now a core piece of their operations.
Fr3dd1 5y ago
Well, I am sorry but in my eyes this just shows bad product quality, bad transparance and missing understanding of basic business stuff on the side of the product. The only reason for software to be existing is to NOT mandate users to check stuff manually.
- VMtest 5y ago
  So software is a "guarantee" thing already that people can trust in? I wonder how many software engineers will be out of their jobs if that actually happens, we will see
- Dragony 5y ago
  Generally speaking software makes things faster, not better. Good software for a bad process will simply expedite problems.
  - throwaway2016a 5y ago
    I tell my clients all the time why I can't just make a "quick change" and I have to manually review the data sometimes and go through a ton of code review. I tell them... > As a human I can only mess up one or two orders a minute. Computers are uniquely qualified to mess up thousands of orders in seconds.
- fvold 5y ago
  As it happens, I'm reading this thread while taking a break from writing tax handling in a piece of e-commerce software. It relies 100% on the settings of the application in question, because tax codes and procedures vary greatly around the world, and it's internationally used software. There are even some stores using this software that sell items to and from different countries using the same website, so it can be set up to handle tax differently per product. Not everything is taxed everywhere, so it will accept it without question if someone sets up a product with the tax class "none", and happily log, process and store an order with 0% tax. Yes, it's a footgun for the inexperienced to be able to accidentally commit tax fraud, but no, the software can't just override the user input and insist that a 25% VAT should be applied to random things based on ... what? The name? A hunch? MaChInE LeArNiNg? Manual audits are used to discover human error, be it my error in creating the software, or your error in the data supplied to the software. I can create the logs and make them as easy to read as possible, but if you don't read them for three months, that's on you.

graderjs 5y ago

It's funny that, with the importance of tax to government revenue, why do governments not make a habit of funding/creating really high quality tax software for businesses/individuals to use? Increases in collection efficiency have historically been associated with growth of the state coffers (and state's whose bureacracies failed to adequately capture tax had to resort to funding themselves in other ways, frequently in the past through "expansionist tendencies", ie, war--for territory, resources etc...which then only works if you can pay for soldiers and equipment). Not that governments seem great at making software (in general), but with something so critical, a focus on this seems like a "sort of" low-hanging fruit...

wildmanx 5y ago
> It's funny that, with the importance of tax to government revenue, why do governments not make a habit of funding/creating really high quality tax software for businesses/individuals to use? Because there is a strong lobby that prevents it. https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f... Money has too strong a foothold in American politics. (In other countries too, but especially in the land of the free.)
- graderjs 5y ago
  Ah yes I heard about this tax software lobby before. It's weird in this case since it's like "money fighting money" haha
- alistairSH 5y ago
  Not just the “TurboTax” lobby, but also a strong contingent of anti-tax conservatives. One of their approaches to gain sympathy to their cause is to keep making taxes hard. If taxes are hard, the general population will want less of them.
  - JackFr 5y ago
    That's not fully true. There is also a contingent of people who like to use the the tax code as a mechanism of policy apart from efficient collection of revenue. Tax credits for education, clean energy, penalties, small businesses, mortage interest, each one of those one-off changes adds complexity, and in total ultimately can make the process dramatically more difficult.
    - samatman 5y ago
      While all of this is true, other countries have a system where the government tells you what tax they believe you owe, and provide the details of how they reached this number. The citizen can either pay that number, or offer amendments to the details which imply a lower rate (or higher if you're a masochist, I suppose). That's independent of the complexity of how that number is derived, and in balance I would rather the US (as a citizen thereof) use this sort of system than the one we happen to have.
      - yencabulator 5y ago
        One thing to add: You're typically still obligated to file a return if the prepared taxes are not correct. You're not "off the hook" in any way by accepting what the prepared statement says. This mostly bites e.g. entrepreneurs with more complicated taxes, especially if you filed for an extension on the business side.
refurb 5y ago
Not sure how software is going to always find "...credit card fraud, internal theft, mis-priced items, mistakes....". I don't care how good AI in finding tumors in x-rays is, I still want a set of skilled eyes to confirm findings. It's the same reason I double check all my paychecks to make sure I'm paid the right amount and the deductions are correct. All of it's automated on the backend, but it's still my money and worth double-checking.
- graderjs 5y ago
  No I wasn't thinking it's a replacement, not 'directly' replying to the ancestor, just riffing on the idea. :)
HWR_14 5y ago
> why do governments not make a habit of funding/creating really high quality tax software for businesses/individuals to use? They do. We can leave aside the practice in many European countries to compute your income taxes for you, based on reporting by your employer and financial services. Even in the US, high quality software is provided for sales tax compliance. In fact, according to the Supreme Court, the presence of that software is one of the main reason they overturned their "no interstate online sales tax" decision in 2018. One reason was > Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement. This system standardizes taxes to reduce administrative and compliance costs: It requires a single, state-level tax administration, uniform definitions of products and services, simplified tax rate structures, and other uniform rules. It also provides sellers access to sales tax administration software paid for by the State. Sellers who choose to use such software are immune from audit liability. Which, I guess to return to the point we set aside, is because companies can lobby for public software for their benefit, but tax prep companies can lobby against public software for their benefit.
wil421 5y ago
I have enough experience with local and federal government that there is no way I want them to build any kind of software. Much less a complicated tax software. It might work in the EU but in the US there’s state/county/municipality taxes that can get quite complicate. My zip code has a small area in my county and my county is at a 6% tax rate. Most of the zip code is another county that has a %7.5 tax rate. I have to double check large online purchases just to make sure it’s correct. Almost every place shows the wrong tax at checkout due to using my zip but’s it’s always fixed when my card is actually charged. Most people are using SAP or Oracle to do this kind of thing because they already know the ins and outs of tax locales.
- YawningAngel 5y ago
  If the tax law is so complex that the government can't correctly implement tax software, how is the government going to collect the taxes?
  - SteveNuts 5y ago
    They pour the resources and money into the enforcement side instead of the collection side.
  - snovv_crash 5y ago
    It's often easier to evaluate compliance than it is to engineer a compliant system.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    The software would have to work everywhere. The tax collections (review/enforcement, really) process only has to work in one place. Tax law in one place is usually clear enough; the complexity is in the aggregate. My state doesn’t have to give a rip that NYC has a city surtax on this but not that, or that some other jurisdiction treats clothing items up to $100 as non-taxable while we put the limit at $175.
  - wil421 5y ago
    The federal government is only one part of it. States, counties, and cities can also impose their own income taxes or sales tax. Or like Florida they can choose not to have an income tax. I suppose that would be like asking the EU commission to provide tax software for all its member states.
giaour 5y ago
> why do governments not make a habit of funding/creating really high quality tax software for businesses/individuals to use? In the US, jurisdictional/funding issues are the biggest blocker. There is no federal sales tax, so the IRS can't use its budget to pay for this. State agencies are not going to be able to use their funds to pay developers to add functionality for a different jurisdiction, and ditto for counties/cities/special districts, which tend to have much smaller budgets anyways. The best avenue would probably be something like ITOR (the funds that give USDS its wide remit to help any gov agency with their tech needs), but states and localities aren't always open to receiving this kind of help. (It did happen with unemployment programs during the pandemic, but the lawyers had to lawyer pretty hard to make that possible.)
- giaour 5y ago
  That said, congress could fund this tomorrow if they wanted. Budgetary concerns apply to executive actions in this arena, but the whole idea sounds like it's necessary and proper for smooth interstate commerce.
dikaio 5y ago
Government made software… I imagine yearly or bi-yearly updates, horrendous UI/UX, count me out.
- chrissnell 5y ago
  That’s honestly only a small part of why I would never want this. More significant, for me, is that this TaxSoftware.gov idea would mean literally thousands more employees on the government payroll, being ineffectual, slow, and bureaucratic. And when their government career is finally over, those people will all take home government pensions, as will their future replacements. Once you create more government, it will never end and will never go away. “The only thing government is good at is creating more government.” - P.J. O’Rourke

zerkten 5y ago

This applies to every industry and consequential process unfortunately. Take something like GDPR deletion requests. Many mid-to-large organizations have automated flows setup to purge accounts after users make requests after very detailed planning with legal and compliance teams. Companies assume this is the end of it and that they don't have to audit and perform maintenance at the engineering team level because it's something that someone in support or another team shoved off the side will own. What you find is one time it's not purging file uploads, other times it's not purging user PII, etc. This all comes back to how poorly we integrate the solutions we build. The position of engineers is such that a free pass is often given for failures like these that are fairly well obscured from view. Similar failures for different roles within the same companies get treated differently. While engineers hold outsized power, it is very difficult to completely address these issues.

Dwolb 5y ago

This tells me we have a long way to go to increase business intelligence literacy in companies. Not sure a ton realize that data is now a core piece of their operations.

Fr3dd1 5y ago

Well, I am sorry but in my eyes this just shows bad product quality, bad transparance and missing understanding of basic business stuff on the side of the product. The only reason for software to be existing is to NOT mandate users to check stuff manually.

VMtest 5y ago
So software is a "guarantee" thing already that people can trust in? I wonder how many software engineers will be out of their jobs if that actually happens, we will see
Dragony 5y ago
Generally speaking software makes things faster, not better. Good software for a bad process will simply expedite problems.
- throwaway2016a 5y ago
  I tell my clients all the time why I can't just make a "quick change" and I have to manually review the data sometimes and go through a ton of code review. I tell them... > As a human I can only mess up one or two orders a minute. Computers are uniquely qualified to mess up thousands of orders in seconds.
fvold 5y ago
As it happens, I'm reading this thread while taking a break from writing tax handling in a piece of e-commerce software. It relies 100% on the settings of the application in question, because tax codes and procedures vary greatly around the world, and it's internationally used software. There are even some stores using this software that sell items to and from different countries using the same website, so it can be set up to handle tax differently per product. Not everything is taxed everywhere, so it will accept it without question if someone sets up a product with the tax class "none", and happily log, process and store an order with 0% tax. Yes, it's a footgun for the inexperienced to be able to accidentally commit tax fraud, but no, the software can't just override the user input and insist that a 25% VAT should be applied to random things based on ... what? The name? A hunch? MaChInE LeArNiNg? Manual audits are used to discover human error, be it my error in creating the software, or your error in the data supplied to the software. I can create the logs and make them as easy to read as possible, but if you don't read them for three months, that's on you.