4 ms·

> You practically need to have a government...develop such a thing. You just gave the answer. Gov tax agencies need to provide an API that devs can use.

eftychis 4y ago
I mean you have issues with convincing the U.S. government to provide pre-filled easy-taxes for W-2(+401k contribution) employees. I would say that you would find even more pressure in other countries.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Many countries have mildly successful open data initiatives, and they probably want taxes to be paid. The US lobbying situation is I think more of an outlier.
bigiain 4y ago
Even if the pipe dream of getting all global governments to provide an API to determine taxes appropriately, there's almost certainly still a business niche aggregating and normalising all those APIs that Open Source probably won't scratch well enough to be able to rely on for tax compliance purposes. Just in the US there are more than 50 "gov tax agencies" (state and federal) that won't (without a very strong federal mandate) all use the same API. Now multiply that over all 200+ countries in the world, and try an imagine any open source dev (or team) writing and maintaining something that stays on top of all the individual "gov tax agencies" you might need to comply with? Hell, even if an open source project _did_ successfully create and set up a community to maintain that, I bet you could make a profitable business on top of it just by insuring/indemnifying enterprise customers who use your version of it as a SaaS offering. (Something Amazon could easily do...)
mekaman 4y ago
At least the Finnish Tax Administration provides an API: https://www.vero.fi/en/About-us/it_developer/tax-administration-interface-services/vero-api/ https://www.vero.fi/en/About-us/it_developer/tax-administrat...

4 ms·

> You practically need to have a government...develop such a thing. You just gave the answer. Gov tax agencies need to provide an API that devs can use.

by zouhair 4y ago

eftychis 4y ago
I mean you have issues with convincing the U.S. government to provide pre-filled easy-taxes for W-2(+401k contribution) employees. I would say that you would find even more pressure in other countries.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Many countries have mildly successful open data initiatives, and they probably want taxes to be paid. The US lobbying situation is I think more of an outlier.
bigiain 4y ago
Even if the pipe dream of getting all global governments to provide an API to determine taxes appropriately, there's almost certainly still a business niche aggregating and normalising all those APIs that Open Source probably won't scratch well enough to be able to rely on for tax compliance purposes. Just in the US there are more than 50 "gov tax agencies" (state and federal) that won't (without a very strong federal mandate) all use the same API. Now multiply that over all 200+ countries in the world, and try an imagine any open source dev (or team) writing and maintaining something that stays on top of all the individual "gov tax agencies" you might need to comply with? Hell, even if an open source project _did_ successfully create and set up a community to maintain that, I bet you could make a profitable business on top of it just by insuring/indemnifying enterprise customers who use your version of it as a SaaS offering. (Something Amazon could easily do...)
mekaman 4y ago
At least the Finnish Tax Administration provides an API: https://www.vero.fi/en/About-us/it_developer/tax-administration-interface-services/vero-api/ https://www.vero.fi/en/About-us/it_developer/tax-administrat...