18 ms·

A Canadian payroll dependency chart

335 points by djha-skin 3y ago

mrloba 3y ago
It's a running joke in our org that we should always vote for a new government. Keep making the dependency graph messy and we'll keep having a job
yigalirani 3y ago
looks like it was made with graphviz, can we get the source code in dot format?
faustocarva 3y ago
"except anyone resident in Quebec, Nova Scotia, Yukon, or Ontario"...it is essentially 75% of Canada!
- munk-a 3y ago
  Quebec is essentially a different country altogether - there are a legion of strange HR rules and requirements that are entirely specific to QC.
  - tharmas 3y ago
    Yes, and heavily subsidized by other parts of Canada via transfer payments.
    - munk-a 3y ago
      Well transfer payments are a lot more complicated than some folks would have you believe - Canada as a nation benefits from all our parts being within a common business zone so while some areas are mineral rich other areas have strong service economies that have needed help through the pandemic.
      - switchbak 3y ago
        "Needed help" because the powers of the day decided to lock down the economy far past any reasonable length of time. I suppose if I quit my job I "need help" feeding myself too. Another example is Quebec sitting on a gargantuan natural gas reserve, but preferring to keep it in the ground because it's more advantageous to simply receive payments from other provinces (Alberta). Carbon/emission considerations aside, this shows just how broken the incentive structure is for equalization payments between provinces. But that's just the tip of the iceberg as far as Canadian governmental issues go, and it's hard to know where to start improving things.
        p_j_w 3y ago
        >Carbon/emission considerations aside This seems like a massive thing to just throw aside.
        cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        He's also neglecting to mention what a mammoth hydroelectric powerhouse Quebec is, because of that, they have a giant surplus of electricity that makes their utility bills extremely cheap relative to anywhere else in North America, helps manufacturing businesses and gives them the ability to export power, to boot. Meanwhile Alberta burns (and leaks) natural gas and coal and gripes because the rest of the country is punishing them for it, and complains to high heaven that we're not making new markets for them (or others) to burn and leak more of it. Quebec and Ontario have prioritized manufacturing over resource extraction, and that benefits their population.
        CarRamrod 3y ago
        Well, if Quebec is the economic powerhouse you claim it is, then surely they will be just fine if the equalization payments stop, right?
        xav0989 3y ago
- cperciva 3y ago
  To be fair, Nova Scotia, Yukon, and Ontario each only add a handful of extra nodes. I just didn't want to bother with those because I'm in BC. Quebec is a different matter; far more complicated to calculate payroll deductions for there.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    And if the crazy proposal from the UCP in Alberta to divorce from the CPP and have their own pension system (like Quebec) is successful, it will get even crazier. Imagine the complications of moving back and forth between provinces. Or seasonal work, etc.
    - cperciva 3y ago
      There's several pages of formulas for dealing with people moving between CPP and QPP. So glad I don't have to deal with those.
      - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        I was born in Alberta and lived there for the first 24ish years of my life, I didn't contribute much when I was there, but it would be something. I shudder to imagine the complications of trying to claim the amounts from that once I retire -- if that proposal happens. Pure insanity.
bigdict 3y ago
Would be nice to have an open source implementation of this.
- jqpabc123 3y ago
  Yes but unlikely because this is an example of the Open Source "black hole" where nothing escapes because developers don't find such specialized business applications very interesting. This requires constant updating and maintenance because tax laws are always changing.
  - busterarm 3y ago
    This kind of thing is the bread and butter of SaaS companies though. It's also exactly the kind of thing companies _wouldn't_ use open source for because if the code gets the tax law wrong they have nobody to transfer liability to. Once you have a corporate entity backing a subscription service, insurance underwriters can understand what's going on and you can finally manage your risks.
mmastrac 3y ago
It's a shame that we don't have open formulas in code form published by the government. The only way that I know how to do this reliably is using the web form provided by the CRA here: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/e-services/digital-services-businesses/payroll-deductions-online-calculator.html https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/e-services/... As you can imagine, doing this by hand is quite painful and error-prone.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Topgamer7 3y ago
  I want something similar for my mortgage calculation. For example I cannot get my bank (TD Canada) to inform me of how much each payment goes towards my principal. I'm pretty sure I've calculated it properly, however the number is often in the 10's of dollars off from what the bank reports my outstanding balance is after a payment is made. Also don't get me started that I can't use an api to get my account details and statements in Canada.
  - MattGaiser 3y ago
    Anecdotally, the bank often cannot tell you how much. It has come up multiple times on /r/personalfinancecanada that the bank isn't really sure or generates a few different calculations. I also worked for a mid sized Canadian bank where the advisors couldn't consistently do it either.
    - bluefirebrand 3y ago
      If you're on a fixed rate mortgage it seems like this should be trivial...? Variable rate throws it out of whack of course.
      - ponector 3y ago
        Having a mortgage with 3-months variable rate bank sends a new schedule everytime rate changes. New schedule is calculated with new rate and consists of payments till the end of the term, with additional info about interest and principal amounts. Same if you do additional payment into the principal - they will give you a new schedule.
phpisthebest 3y ago
[flagged]
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  FYI, the above link is not for the Canadian federal tax code, just the federal payroll taxes. From what I have encountered with US federal payroll taxes, it did not seem anywhere near as complicated as the above link. Other than withholding federal income tax and FICA and FUTA, not sure what else there would be.
  - mixdup 3y ago
    Yeah, in the US it's a certain percentage up to a limit, and some people are exempt. Pretty simple in terms of doing payroll All the complexity is when you file your actual return, and that one would literally be impossible to chart out because there are so many different nooks and crannies that exist that most people don't need to worry about but might so they are out there. I suspect that is also the case in Canada in addition to this payroll calculation nightmare
- woodruffw 3y ago
  Can you provide an example of the US corporate tax code contradicting itself? Ambiguity is one thing, but I've never heard anybody claim that there's an actual formal contradiction in the tax code itself.
  - jacobr1 3y ago
    Aren't most the contradictions forms of ambiguity? Two overlapping scenarios where some sort of administrative ruling is needed to clarify which dominates. Does that count as contradiction? https://www.irs.gov/irb https://www.irs.gov/irb is full of this kind of stuff.
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      I don't think so, at least not in the logical sense (an ambiguity means that the terms need to be refined to produce a decision, whereas a contradiction means that no decision exists). (Maybe this distinction is silly, but I think it's important: ambiguity is inevitable, but asserting that the IRS knowingly maintains contradictory rules suggests some kind of sovereign-citizen-adjacent thinking.)
sdwvit 3y ago
Props to the author. At this point, CRA should just post a reference implementation of all the formulas, so that small businesses can benefit from it.
- betaby 3y ago
  They won't. They have no mandate to provide a clear answer.
  - j45 3y ago
    Bureaucracies gotta bureaucracize.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Honestly, I've always found CRA friendly, competent, and responsive. But, I also don't run a small business, and am just a tax payer. Though when I had a small consultancy and corporation they were also actually fine to deal with.
    - betaby 3y ago
      Do you have kids? If so, did you try to deduct extracurricular activities? I did and was audited, also 100% of my friends were audited for the kids related deductions. Anecdata of course. Also I find Canadian personal taxes are way too complicated. I can think only of Italy where allegedly personal taxes even more complex.
      - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        I used to do those deductions for my kids, yep. Never had a problem. I seem to recall from the last 4 or 5 filings that those deductions are gone now. The only thing I had to do each year was figure out the capital gains on my RSUs (in USD, so a bit fiddly). And now this year I have nothing like that, so it's just "here's my RRSP contributions, and yes, those T4s look like mine, confirmed, ok bye"
      - 3y ago
nampas 3y ago
That's funny, I made something similar a few years ago for the IRS https://nampas.github.io/tax-map/ https://nampas.github.io/tax-map/
- tantalor 3y ago
  This is the worst version of Planarity I've ever seen, congrats.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    For those that haven't played it, Planarity is a graph untangling game. https://www.jasondavies.com/planarity/ https://www.jasondavies.com/planarity/
    - tantalor 3y ago
      This version is really good
- mp05 3y ago
  Dear lord, that's frightening.
- mmsc 3y ago
  Very very cool. Is there a word for a directional graph in this circular form? Also, is every edge unidirectional, or are there some bidirectional edges? I would hope (and assume) there's nothing bidirectional, but...
  - chipaca 3y ago
    From the looks of it that's been generated by `circo`, which is part of GraphViz and describes itself as a “filter for circular layout of graphs” and circo draws graphs using a circular layout (see Six and Tollis, GD '99 and ALENEX '99, and Kaufmann and Wiese, GD '02.) The tool identifies biconnected components and draws the nodes of the component on a cir‐ cle. The block‐cutpoint tree is then laid out using a recursive radial algorithm. Edge crossings within a circle are minimized by placing as many edges on the circle's perimeter as possible. In particular, if the component is outerplanar, the component will have a planar layout. If a node belongs to multiple non‐trivial biconnected components, the layout puts the node in one of them. By default, this is the first non‐ trivial component found in the search from the root component.
maelito 3y ago
In France, these rules are available as a website, an API, a NPM package, and raw rules in the https://publi.codes https://publi.codes language. https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/développeur https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/développeur
- spydum 3y ago
  thats pretty cool, I wonder though what the implication is if there is a bug or package hijacking? Are you expected to cross check the calculations and they are only offered as a convenience, and not authoritative?
  - cbarrick 3y ago
    The formulas are published in a programming language called M. There is an open source implementation [1]. > There is currently no legal guarantee of any kind about the correctness of the code produced by the Mlang compiler, or by the results produced by the interpreter of Mlang. However, authors have been in contact with DGFiP to validate Mlang, and the system passes all the private DGFiP tests as of Sept. 2022 for the version of the source files responsible for computing the tax on the 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 income. [1] https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang
    - adolph 3y ago
      MLanguage in this context is not M, aka MUMPS. MUMPS ("Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System"), or M, is an imperative, high-level programming language with an integrated transaction processing key–value database. It was originally developed at Massachusetts General Hospital for managing hospital laboratory information systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
      - mattgrice 3y ago
        Useful comment. Unfortunately M or MUMPS is still in active use at EPIC, etc. Far too many good grads of midwest schools get sucked into working for EPIC or the insurance mines in Des Moines, Omaha, etc. UW Madison, UIUC, and Michigan are way too good of schools to be sending their grads to work on medical records or insurance.
choeger 3y ago
This demonstrates how any algorithm, software or not, works: Start with something desirable or necessary and add complications until you end up with a mess that can be used to yield arbitrary results, drive outsiders into madness, and summon some lesser demons if read in a chanting manner. Now what could be done about this? The obvious answer is refactoring. That's what politicians promise in election campaigns and junior software developers demand when encountering a new code base. It's rarely ever done in practice because no one can disambiguate unnecessary from desired features and complexities. The second answer would be a clean implementation in some more formal framework (a statically typed language, a theorem prover, ...). That second solution often fails when attempted because the system is already unsound. Fortunately, no one cares about those "weird corner cases" and everything is left as-is until someone runs away with a million dollars or so.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  In actuality the CRA and recent federal gov'ts have done a lot to simplify taxes in Canada. It's way simpler these days. Though obviously this payroll stuff is an exception. 10-15 years ago there were piles of special exemptions carved out for all sorts of things (mostly to buy votes.) These days, if you don't have self-employment or foreign investments, etc and are just the typical paycheque-receiving wage slave, filing taxes is trivial and mostly automatic. The bulk of the complication in the above graph seems to do with the fact that Canada is a highly federal system, with provinces having various relevant powers and oddities carved out as a result of that. That, and the existence federal employment insurance and pension plan systems.
  - switchbak 3y ago
    "trivial and mostly automatic" - but not so automatic that it's done for you, as in some other countries. And that's by design - Intuit still wants their cash cow providing that sweet sweet revenue every tax season.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      I don't see how Intuit has any pull on Canadian tax law or influence with the CRA. And there are plenty of alternatives. I used ufile.ca for years, way cheaper. And honestly, just picking up the form and doing it yourself is all my parents did for years. I'm pretty sure we'll see what you're asking for within the next 5-10 years. With them already having the T4s, etc. I don't see why they couldn't have you login to their site, confirm everything, and submit.
rsaz 3y ago
Are there any countries with good, reasonable tax systems? I'm only familiar with Canada and the USA, both of which are a bit of a mess, though seemingly in different ways. I'd be very interested in hearing what the process is like in other places.
- dkga 3y ago
  Switzerland tax law is pretty straightforward and the cantonal (local government) tax authorities are known for being very helpful in explaining things to taxpayers in doubt, an experience I had more than once.
  - bradley13 3y ago
    I dunno, the sheer size of our personal (Swiss) tax return is daunting - and we are pretty ordinary. Maybe not as insane as the US, but "simple" would be different.
- jqpabc123 3y ago
  The EU has VAT (value added tax) which is added to each purchase. At the end of the year, there is nothing to report and nothing to pay. It doesn't get much simpler than this.
  - koliber 3y ago
    The original post is about income tax. While VAT is a tax, it is not an income tax.
    - jqpabc123 3y ago
      The post I responded to asked: Are there any countries with good, reasonable tax systems? VAT is a reasonable alternative to income taxes but neither the question nor my response ever specified "income".
      - ska 3y ago
narrator 3y ago
Being someone who has some experience with tax law, the cycle of tax complexity goes like this: 1. Tax law is passed. 2. Really smart CPAs and Tax Lawyers figure out ways to legally avoid paying taxes. 3. Tax people issue regulations intended to close those loopholes. 4. Administrations change and they want to win votes and tweak the economy so they lower some taxes and add tax breaks. 5. New administration comes in and selectively reverses previous administration's program because of politics. 6. If the tax is international tax, then add really smart tax lawyer doing multi-jurisdictional tricks to lower taxes (e.g Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich[1]) , governments trying to encourage multi-nationals to do business there by adding incentives to their tax code, the OECD coming in and trying to standardize tax stuff across jurisdictions to prevent this, individual pairs of countries doing tax treaties with each other, etc. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/double-irish-with-a-dutch-sandwich.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/double-irish-with-a-dut...
- cperciva 3y ago
  None of this complexity is from trying to plug tax loopholes. Most of it is from politicians wanting to name things. For example, for decades Canada has had a "personal amount" tax credit -- for arcane reasons, rather than saying "the first $X of income isn't taxed", the lowest tax bracket starts at $0 but there's a non-refundable credit equal to the lowest tax rate times $X. Then a politician came along and said "we should increase the personal amount so that people can earn more money without paying taxes... but we don't want to decrease taxes on the top 1%". So now we have a "personal amount" which depends on your income. Similarly, in BC we have the "BC Tax Reduction" which is an extra tax credit given to people with incomes between (roughly) $22k and $36k. Both of those examples could have simply been implemented as tax brackets but voters get far more excited about a "Tax Reduction" than they do about a new tax bracket.
  - p_j_w 3y ago
    >Both of those examples could have simply been implemented as tax brackets but voters get far more excited about a "Tax Reduction" than they do about a new tax bracket. Doesn't sound like the problem is entirely on the politicians here.
bojangleslover 3y ago
[flagged]
- piperswe 3y ago
  A 401(k) match _is_ free money though. When you leave the company, you can just cash out the account - the penalty will still probably be less than the match gave you, so you come out ahead. Of course, it's best to just let it sit in retirement accounts until you can take a qualified distribution.
  - jacobr1 3y ago
    Only in the sense that you can optionally not accept it. But it still is part of your compensation, as is in effect, even the "employer-paid" portions of healthcare and other benefits. From the perspective of the employer they are part of your costs and the direct payments reflect that, likewise you would need to pay those costs yourself if you were self-employed.
    - Spivak 3y ago
      So it's a semantic thing, employees know it's not literally free and comes from their employer but it's free in the sense that it's in excess of their negotiated salary.
  - amluto 3y ago
    > When you leave the company, you can just cash out the account You can even get fancy and roll it over into an IRA and, if you have excess cash, convert it to a Roth IRA.
- soared 3y ago
  Im in the same boat - would you mind explaining to us every other Friday folk why the employer match isn’t free money?
  - irrational 3y ago
concordDance 3y ago
I once made one of these for HMRC's self assessment tax calculation[1], it had about a thousand nodes. [1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5dfa35f4e5274a66f4fb5a65/2020_tcg.zip https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5dfa35f4e5274...
CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
It’s charts like this why payroll providers exist. See the relevant _Bits About Money_ post at https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/payroll-providers-power-respect/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/payroll-providers-pow...
- j45 3y ago
  It's still math and the standardizing to ensure what payroll providers submit is correct is still checked by the government, who could provide said standard.
  - worik 3y ago
    When things get complex even the payroll providers get it wrong Where I live (New Zealand) holiday pay got complex, and quite a few civil service payrolls got it wrong (IIRC by a few different providors). It tooke years for anyone to notice, and has taken years, and billions, to put right. Keep it simple. Please
    - j45 3y ago
      Payroll providers absolutely still get it wrong but not always because it's too hard. I joke, but a little serious when I say asking bureauracies to get details correct, quickly and consistently might be too much, let alone with software that could threaten jobs and meetings. Canada had a payroll implementation failure in government that received international attention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system Having implemented more than I've wanted to - too many are still anchored in the past on a mainframe, abstracted away with a web and/or mobile app. Still worse, many payroll providers, particularly one of the very largest in Canada, actually still processes payroll according to a "model" that's manually run. It's an excel model, run manually by people. You deal with people directly. Do anything off a beaten path? Guess which model to win.
juujian 3y ago
Very nice chart. Since the bubbles are wider than they are high, I would have probably changes the direction from left to right. Which in graphviz in theory (but only in theory!) takes just one line.
transcriptase 3y ago
The fun part about being Canadian is that you get to compete with the entire world for remote jobs with Canadian companies, but no company based outside of Canada wants to deal with hoops required to hire a remote employee based in Canada if they don’t already have a presence here.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- busterarm 3y ago
  I know one L.A.-based company that hires tons of remote Canadians, especially in engineering, because they're cheaper...but they're essentially a payroll/business accounting company.
- funksta 3y ago
  Try finding work as a sole proprietor contractor, remotely for a US company. It's cheaper for them vs hiring an in-office employee, and with higher US tech salaries and currency conversion, you'll generally come out ahead too
  - j45 3y ago
    A foreign company doesn't need to make it easy to hire an employee who is a Canadian. If there is an advantage to a Canadian to be employed from a foreign company, it's maybe a bit more up to them if they want to do a bit to stand out a lot. A single person corporation in Canada akin to a professional corporation like a doctor or lawyer may have is not out of the question, especially with the advantages it can provide.
- ska 3y ago
  This is pretty true most places, hiring non contract (e.g. full time) employees in a different country is a pain in the ass. Europe is trickier than Canada, fwiw, on average at least. These days there are a number of companies that specialize in simplifying this, including liability shields, but of course for a fee. Honestly it’s easier to do it as consulting or freelance contracts, but that puts the employee in exactly the same position as OP. Still, for e.g. typical tech jobs an account to sort it all out for you will be maybe 3k or so, many will opt for that.
dangerboysteve 3y ago
Last time I looked at Canadian payroll services, many were very affordable. Why bother spending the time on this ?
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Why should calculating how much money to give the government cost money?
  - dangerboysteve 3y ago
    Because of the time it takes to record and distribute everything and pay the government.
- gus_massa 3y ago
  He likes solving almost imposible math problems.
- chrisfosterelli 3y ago
  Paying for something helps but doesn't entirely free you from a responsibility to understand this flow. Because an employee is going to ask you why they have X on their payroll and not Y like they calculated on their end and then you have to spend an afternoon reverse engineering everything the tool did because "our payroll tool just did it like that" isn't a very professional answer.
jerf 3y ago
Are there any loops? I extend this question to all the people who have posted their own graphs of other similar things.
robertlagrant 3y ago
I think what's clear is that regardless of how complex this appears, we should never blame mistakes or loopholes arising from this complexity on the law makers. Only on tax payers.
- j45 3y ago
  And the cost.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    It would be nice if accountancy fees were tax-deductible.
    - j45 3y ago
      Corporations can, not people. Maybe because the size of revenue from both groups.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        Possibly. But if they were tax-deductible from people, it'd be a nice downward pressure on more complex rules on getting money from people.
from-nibly 3y ago
The solution is not to automate or codify any of this, it's to remove it. This is utter nonsense. What problem could this possibly solve other than widening the equality gap?
Evidlo 3y ago
Devil's advocate: I have never seen a GraphViz plot that didn't look like spaghetti, so the fact that this plot looks like a mess doesn't mean much to me.
orzig 3y ago
I'm in the US but I'll say for sure that things like this are about half the reason I haven't hired any employees for my LLC. I wish I could, but I'd be de facto hiring an accountant as well!
- jweir 3y ago
  If you are considering hiring and the hire is a developer or at all involved in research and experimentation make sure you are well versed in Section 174. You could be on the hook for a large tax bill since you have to write off developer expenses over 5 years – this is true whether an employee or contractor. Hopefully it will be repealed* – but if not it is one of those things that no one would expect to exist since it is in the words of Senator Wyden "stupid." https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/174 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/174 * edit It won't be repealed but a law can be created to ignored it until a future date. Once on the books, because of accounting, it is very hard to remove a tax law.
  - shutupnerd0000 3y ago
    My guy, you're replying to someone that said theyre not considering hiring
    - orzig 3y ago
      That's fine, I appreciate it! We're all conversing in public, and I'm sure it will be useful to someone. And besides, this information makes me even more happy with an opinion I already have - isn't that what the internet is for?
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
  If you ever consider to, *given the remote work trends*, consider this: I'd place high importance on the employee state to the state you are hiring them out of. Some states are a nightmare to deal with. For example, NJ, CA, NY and OH. Once you are registered in X state, your company is fair game to be pursued for any kind of perceived (lack of) compliance by that state, long after that employee has left you for another job. For example, you could earn a large fine for not filing to report you have no staff in the state. States that I found were lovely to deal with were ID, TN, and TX. Generally speaking, its highly recommendable to hire employees from your state only for this reason. I would not hire unless you are absolutely needing to.
neilv 3y ago
Several years ago, I worked through my US IRS tax return forms by coding the data and calculations in Scheme. The representation ended up being that each form line value was a Scheme procedure that called other such procedures, which was one way to enforce dependencies. (Fortunately, there were no cycles in the dependencies, like the article author found in their CRA payroll deductions work.) I don't have the code handy, but the procedures typically looked like this: (define (form-1234-line-22--foo-income-dollars) 234.00) (define (form-1234-line-23--taxable-bar-income-dollars) (max (+ (form-1234-line-22--foo-income-dollars) (form-1234-line-21--baz-income-dollars) (form-1234-schedule-x-line-10--total-blort-dollars)) 0.00)) It was a lot of work, but (since I used error placeholders for many code paths my own data wouldn't exercise) not that much more work than I had to do anyway, for doing my returns with just the PDF forms and instructions. (The extra work came when I had to enter and double-check the form data manually in the official format, for this one-off exercise.) I did this exercise to see what it would look like, would it save me time/headache, and did it suggest anything about DSLs for this kind of work (say, for domain experts to codify and maintain something more formal and checkable than the form instructions or tax code).
- cdcarter 3y ago
  Did you take advantage of the homoiconicity of scheme to make this happen?
  - neilv 3y ago
    In this case, I was first seeing what could be done with basic Scheme algorithmic programming language mechanisms (e.g., using procedures and the magic of toplevel definitions). Then, after seeing how tax form logic ended up that way, one direction would be to define a DSL that makes that easier to work with. For example, if we find everything can be implemented as these procedures, or with maybe with an additional concept (such as to handle cycles like in the article), a simple first step DSL might be another s-expression language that has magic variables that are more akin to spreadsheet cell references, in that the dependencies are evaluated in order. And it might also do things like populate a hashtable with the cached values for application use (e.g., PDF form-filling). That DSL might be implemented as a simple `syntax-case` or `syntax-parse` transformer. If that works and could, we could optimally make it more palatable/marketable/politic by defining a keywords-and-whitespace grammar that parses by transforming those syntax objects to syntax objects in our intermediate s-expression DSL (which transforms to the basic Scheme code approach we worked out originally). There are other valid ways (say, you want tax law logic to be definable dynamically at run time). Though some involve `eval`, which I discourage. https://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/2014-July/063597.html https://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/2014-July/063597...
sidcool 3y ago
How does one even begin Designing a software system for such a complex process! The impact of a bug in such system would be huge!!
- jeffrallen 3y ago
  I once spent an hour removing a few cents' error in a salary-computation and then 2 weeks implementing the correct one-time payment to 200 staff in order to make them whole from a couple years of incorrect salaries. The whole thing cost about $2000, so each individual adjustment was small, but we had to do it with transparency and humility to maintain worker happiness.
- j45 3y ago
  It would need to be flexible, auditable, historical (each year ran it's version). So, basically, no software devs really at the business analysis layer. The process mapping has to be the code. Decision making in the process mapping has to be editable. It's quite doable and present with some of the current software packages that operate in the finance / insurance / banking / government / enterprise space. Imho, how software has historically been created for business is now broken. Software used to aim for a fixed, or slowly changing operating model, and the pandemic kind of introduced a bunch of ongoing change. Software will become more malleable as a result.
jeffrallen 3y ago
Would be interesting to have a constitutional requirement on government to be able to explain taxes to citizens in a declarative language with a max complexity of N bits of information. Railroad unions: you want an exemption for your members? Write a diff and go to war with hedge fund managers to get the bits you need to implement your boondoggle. :) I'm reminded of the "delta this build causes in bytes of flashrom" reports you see at the bottom of a compile job on embedded platforms.
phailhaus 3y ago
Graphs are terrible for visualizing dependencies. Even a reasonable system can "look messy" when rendered this way. I'd be more interested in seeing what this would look like as a tangled tree. [1] [1] https://observablehq.com/@nitaku/tangled-tree-visualization-ii https://observablehq.com/@nitaku/tangled-tree-visualization-...
personomas 3y ago
[flagged]
- drchiu 3y ago
  A lot of countries trend toward bureaucracy as their biggest “innovation”. Unfortunately, the same people who are in position to change things for the better (ie. to make a country more competitive, innovative) stands to benefit from more bureaucracy, not less.
  - pas 3y ago
    there are good bureaucratic innovations (standardized forms, applying service design to forms, digitalization, self service portals, browser based, etc) and then there's the usual problem when good intentions get translated into process, and it fucks up everything. for example US government forms require UX testing (user research), but even the smallest change requires it, and all forms require it. but you can't just use a big pool of preapproved providers or whatever, it goes through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs ... which now is in effect a fucking big roadblock of a bottleneck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperwork_Reduction_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperwork_Reduction_Act https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jennifer-pahlka.html?showTranscript=1 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
- patchtopic 3y ago
  some valid points at the start, but as soon as the "woke mind virus" is mentioned we know we are dealing with a moron who can't see the forest for the trees - a classic example of Godwin's Second Law
  - leemelone 3y ago
    incorrect.
- HorizonXP 3y ago
  I don’t think the “woke-mind-virus” superlative is conducive to the type of conversation we should be having but otherwise I fully agree. Canada does nothing to promote home-grown economic prosperity. What is the value in adding those taxes and fees on a $10 part? Do we honestly believe that type of protectionism is going to create a bunch of jobs domestically? Our GDP has grown mostly due to real estate. I work in tech and run a software-based business that does very well. But every time I look to secure new clients, I always look south. I haven’t been employed by Canadians in over 10 years.
nb_key 3y ago
Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses (CFIB) has a more simpler template for small business. https://www.cfib-fcei.ca/en/tools-resources/payroll-deduction-tables https://www.cfib-fcei.ca/en/tools-resources/payroll-deductio...
1letterunixname 3y ago
Complexity is a signal of attempted fairness, selective corruption, or bureaucratic survival, stochastically mixed to conceal the latter 2. Canadian and US governments have enough information to calculate taxes for you, but choose instead to impose all manner of additional complexity, cost, and time sink on taxpayers of varying degrees of sophistication because it's tradition. Norway has prepared statements automatically for taxpayers for 20+ years.
Joel_Mckay 3y ago
Doing your own taxes is like doing your own dental work. You will never be able to keep up with the legal, bureaucratic, and financial changes. Whatever a local competent accounting firm charges, they will almost always recover their cost in a commercial return. If you have under 12 employees, than ADP payroll can work in some situation.
- nayuki 3y ago
  Taxes are a social construct; teeth aren't. Some taxes are simple enough that a grade schooler can do it. For example, very few people would find difficulty in applying Ontario's 13% Harmonized Sales Tax to general retail purchases. Why shouldn't we aim to have an accessible and equitable tax system that doesn't require dedicated experts ("priests") to interpret?
  - Joel_Mckay 3y ago
    lol, most fail to understand there is an intricate relationship with the corporate tax and credits system. It is a full time job figuring out the retention of company treasure, handling capital losses constructively, and legal posture preparation to minimize risk. While founders-syndrome tricks people into thinking they can do anything... they can't do everything... and often end up doing nothing when bankrupt. You can learn the hard/expensive/painful way, or do things the easy way the first time to retain more cash to invest back into the firm, If you are an employee filing a T4, and or a shareholder filing your T5... there is still a minefield of mistakes that can trigger taxable events. Depends how much you can legally retain, but the tax systems are often similar to a crime of omission in that it ensures you will miss most opportunities. These rules are complex on purpose. Best of luck, and don't drop the soap =)
SurgeArrest 3y ago
Tax laws as well as other laws, need to have a requirement to be rewritten from scratch and re-approved every 10 years or so, such that no law or regulation is complex enough that an elected official can't describe it in full before voting on it.
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  It will never happen. Tax law is complex by design, partially because it seeks to do things that are simply impossible, and partially because anybody with enough power to influence changing it benefits from the complex quagmire of ambiguous laws. The complexity allows the IRS to run roughshod over most people and businesses, but the truly powerful can do almost anything they want if they pay for enough advisors and lawyers. The system is in a perfect equilibrium in that respect. I personally think that if a government fails to enforce a law to a reasonable standard, then the law should be invalidated. Which is probably quite similar to your idea, and addresses the problems created by discretionary enforcement. But that will never happen either.
chad_purposecpa 3y ago
CPA here. Probably can save you a lot of time, if you're in Canada, register for Wagepoint 2.0 and save a lot of grief. It's inexpensive and connects to QBO so your books are happy. Files and remits to CRA by itself. No need to deconstruct with code. Ask me more here: www.purposecpa.ca
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Excited for a future where arbitrary complexity is dealt with by millions of personalized LLMs that completely simplify any regulatory hurdle by grasping an intention and figuring out the rest.
swalberg 3y ago
I used to run a small payroll company in Canada, everything was done in Rails. Call it brute force but every time the rules updated I'd run scraper against the CRA calculator that would calculate payroll across a variety of provinces and pay ranges and output it as rspec. Then i could test that i was compliant and hadn't missed a rule or typoed a value.

335 points by djha-skin 3y ago

It's a running joke in our org that we should always vote for a new government. Keep making the dependency graph messy and we'll keep having a job

yigalirani 3y ago

looks like it was made with graphviz, can we get the source code in dot format?

faustocarva 3y ago

"except anyone resident in Quebec, Nova Scotia, Yukon, or Ontario"...it is essentially 75% of Canada!

munk-a 3y ago
Quebec is essentially a different country altogether - there are a legion of strange HR rules and requirements that are entirely specific to QC.
- tharmas 3y ago
  Yes, and heavily subsidized by other parts of Canada via transfer payments.
  - munk-a 3y ago
    Well transfer payments are a lot more complicated than some folks would have you believe - Canada as a nation benefits from all our parts being within a common business zone so while some areas are mineral rich other areas have strong service economies that have needed help through the pandemic.
    - switchbak 3y ago
      "Needed help" because the powers of the day decided to lock down the economy far past any reasonable length of time. I suppose if I quit my job I "need help" feeding myself too. Another example is Quebec sitting on a gargantuan natural gas reserve, but preferring to keep it in the ground because it's more advantageous to simply receive payments from other provinces (Alberta). Carbon/emission considerations aside, this shows just how broken the incentive structure is for equalization payments between provinces. But that's just the tip of the iceberg as far as Canadian governmental issues go, and it's hard to know where to start improving things.
      - p_j_w 3y ago
        >Carbon/emission considerations aside This seems like a massive thing to just throw aside.
        cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        He's also neglecting to mention what a mammoth hydroelectric powerhouse Quebec is, because of that, they have a giant surplus of electricity that makes their utility bills extremely cheap relative to anywhere else in North America, helps manufacturing businesses and gives them the ability to export power, to boot. Meanwhile Alberta burns (and leaks) natural gas and coal and gripes because the rest of the country is punishing them for it, and complains to high heaven that we're not making new markets for them (or others) to burn and leak more of it. Quebec and Ontario have prioritized manufacturing over resource extraction, and that benefits their population.
        CarRamrod 3y ago
        Well, if Quebec is the economic powerhouse you claim it is, then surely they will be just fine if the equalization payments stop, right?
        xav0989 3y ago
cperciva 3y ago
To be fair, Nova Scotia, Yukon, and Ontario each only add a handful of extra nodes. I just didn't want to bother with those because I'm in BC. Quebec is a different matter; far more complicated to calculate payroll deductions for there.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  And if the crazy proposal from the UCP in Alberta to divorce from the CPP and have their own pension system (like Quebec) is successful, it will get even crazier. Imagine the complications of moving back and forth between provinces. Or seasonal work, etc.
  - cperciva 3y ago
    There's several pages of formulas for dealing with people moving between CPP and QPP. So glad I don't have to deal with those.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      I was born in Alberta and lived there for the first 24ish years of my life, I didn't contribute much when I was there, but it would be something. I shudder to imagine the complications of trying to claim the amounts from that once I retire -- if that proposal happens. Pure insanity.

bigdict 3y ago

Would be nice to have an open source implementation of this.

jqpabc123 3y ago
Yes but unlikely because this is an example of the Open Source "black hole" where nothing escapes because developers don't find such specialized business applications very interesting. This requires constant updating and maintenance because tax laws are always changing.
- busterarm 3y ago
  This kind of thing is the bread and butter of SaaS companies though. It's also exactly the kind of thing companies _wouldn't_ use open source for because if the code gets the tax law wrong they have nobody to transfer liability to. Once you have a corporate entity backing a subscription service, insurance underwriters can understand what's going on and you can finally manage your risks.

mmastrac 3y ago

It's a shame that we don't have open formulas in code form published by the government. The only way that I know how to do this reliably is using the web form provided by the CRA here: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/e-services/digital-services-businesses/payroll-deductions-online-calculator.html https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/e-services/... As you can imagine, doing this by hand is quite painful and error-prone.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Topgamer7 3y ago
I want something similar for my mortgage calculation. For example I cannot get my bank (TD Canada) to inform me of how much each payment goes towards my principal. I'm pretty sure I've calculated it properly, however the number is often in the 10's of dollars off from what the bank reports my outstanding balance is after a payment is made. Also don't get me started that I can't use an api to get my account details and statements in Canada.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  Anecdotally, the bank often cannot tell you how much. It has come up multiple times on /r/personalfinancecanada that the bank isn't really sure or generates a few different calculations. I also worked for a mid sized Canadian bank where the advisors couldn't consistently do it either.
  - bluefirebrand 3y ago
    If you're on a fixed rate mortgage it seems like this should be trivial...? Variable rate throws it out of whack of course.
    - ponector 3y ago
      Having a mortgage with 3-months variable rate bank sends a new schedule everytime rate changes. New schedule is calculated with new rate and consists of payments till the end of the term, with additional info about interest and principal amounts. Same if you do additional payment into the principal - they will give you a new schedule.

phpisthebest 3y ago

[flagged]

lotsofpulp 3y ago
FYI, the above link is not for the Canadian federal tax code, just the federal payroll taxes. From what I have encountered with US federal payroll taxes, it did not seem anywhere near as complicated as the above link. Other than withholding federal income tax and FICA and FUTA, not sure what else there would be.
- mixdup 3y ago
  Yeah, in the US it's a certain percentage up to a limit, and some people are exempt. Pretty simple in terms of doing payroll All the complexity is when you file your actual return, and that one would literally be impossible to chart out because there are so many different nooks and crannies that exist that most people don't need to worry about but might so they are out there. I suspect that is also the case in Canada in addition to this payroll calculation nightmare
woodruffw 3y ago
Can you provide an example of the US corporate tax code contradicting itself? Ambiguity is one thing, but I've never heard anybody claim that there's an actual formal contradiction in the tax code itself.
- jacobr1 3y ago
  Aren't most the contradictions forms of ambiguity? Two overlapping scenarios where some sort of administrative ruling is needed to clarify which dominates. Does that count as contradiction? https://www.irs.gov/irb https://www.irs.gov/irb is full of this kind of stuff.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    I don't think so, at least not in the logical sense (an ambiguity means that the terms need to be refined to produce a decision, whereas a contradiction means that no decision exists). (Maybe this distinction is silly, but I think it's important: ambiguity is inevitable, but asserting that the IRS knowingly maintains contradictory rules suggests some kind of sovereign-citizen-adjacent thinking.)

sdwvit 3y ago

Props to the author. At this point, CRA should just post a reference implementation of all the formulas, so that small businesses can benefit from it.

betaby 3y ago
They won't. They have no mandate to provide a clear answer.
- j45 3y ago
  Bureaucracies gotta bureaucracize.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Honestly, I've always found CRA friendly, competent, and responsive. But, I also don't run a small business, and am just a tax payer. Though when I had a small consultancy and corporation they were also actually fine to deal with.
  - betaby 3y ago
    Do you have kids? If so, did you try to deduct extracurricular activities? I did and was audited, also 100% of my friends were audited for the kids related deductions. Anecdata of course. Also I find Canadian personal taxes are way too complicated. I can think only of Italy where allegedly personal taxes even more complex.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      I used to do those deductions for my kids, yep. Never had a problem. I seem to recall from the last 4 or 5 filings that those deductions are gone now. The only thing I had to do each year was figure out the capital gains on my RSUs (in USD, so a bit fiddly). And now this year I have nothing like that, so it's just "here's my RRSP contributions, and yes, those T4s look like mine, confirmed, ok bye"
    - 3y ago

nampas 3y ago

That's funny, I made something similar a few years ago for the IRS https://nampas.github.io/tax-map/ https://nampas.github.io/tax-map/

tantalor 3y ago
This is the worst version of Planarity I've ever seen, congrats.
- fragmede 3y ago
  For those that haven't played it, Planarity is a graph untangling game. https://www.jasondavies.com/planarity/ https://www.jasondavies.com/planarity/
  - tantalor 3y ago
    This version is really good
mp05 3y ago
Dear lord, that's frightening.
mmsc 3y ago
Very very cool. Is there a word for a directional graph in this circular form? Also, is every edge unidirectional, or are there some bidirectional edges? I would hope (and assume) there's nothing bidirectional, but...
- chipaca 3y ago
  From the looks of it that's been generated by `circo`, which is part of GraphViz and describes itself as a “filter for circular layout of graphs” and circo draws graphs using a circular layout (see Six and Tollis, GD '99 and ALENEX '99, and Kaufmann and Wiese, GD '02.) The tool identifies biconnected components and draws the nodes of the component on a cir‐ cle. The block‐cutpoint tree is then laid out using a recursive radial algorithm. Edge crossings within a circle are minimized by placing as many edges on the circle's perimeter as possible. In particular, if the component is outerplanar, the component will have a planar layout. If a node belongs to multiple non‐trivial biconnected components, the layout puts the node in one of them. By default, this is the first non‐ trivial component found in the search from the root component.

maelito 3y ago

In France, these rules are available as a website, an API, a NPM package, and raw rules in the https://publi.codes https://publi.codes language. https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/développeur https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/développeur

spydum 3y ago
thats pretty cool, I wonder though what the implication is if there is a bug or package hijacking? Are you expected to cross check the calculations and they are only offered as a convenience, and not authoritative?
- cbarrick 3y ago
  The formulas are published in a programming language called M. There is an open source implementation [1]. > There is currently no legal guarantee of any kind about the correctness of the code produced by the Mlang compiler, or by the results produced by the interpreter of Mlang. However, authors have been in contact with DGFiP to validate Mlang, and the system passes all the private DGFiP tests as of Sept. 2022 for the version of the source files responsible for computing the tax on the 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 income. [1] https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang
  - adolph 3y ago
    MLanguage in this context is not M, aka MUMPS. MUMPS ("Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System"), or M, is an imperative, high-level programming language with an integrated transaction processing key–value database. It was originally developed at Massachusetts General Hospital for managing hospital laboratory information systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
    - mattgrice 3y ago
      Useful comment. Unfortunately M or MUMPS is still in active use at EPIC, etc. Far too many good grads of midwest schools get sucked into working for EPIC or the insurance mines in Des Moines, Omaha, etc. UW Madison, UIUC, and Michigan are way too good of schools to be sending their grads to work on medical records or insurance.

choeger 3y ago

This demonstrates how any algorithm, software or not, works: Start with something desirable or necessary and add complications until you end up with a mess that can be used to yield arbitrary results, drive outsiders into madness, and summon some lesser demons if read in a chanting manner. Now what could be done about this? The obvious answer is refactoring. That's what politicians promise in election campaigns and junior software developers demand when encountering a new code base. It's rarely ever done in practice because no one can disambiguate unnecessary from desired features and complexities. The second answer would be a clean implementation in some more formal framework (a statically typed language, a theorem prover, ...). That second solution often fails when attempted because the system is already unsound. Fortunately, no one cares about those "weird corner cases" and everything is left as-is until someone runs away with a million dollars or so.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
In actuality the CRA and recent federal gov'ts have done a lot to simplify taxes in Canada. It's way simpler these days. Though obviously this payroll stuff is an exception. 10-15 years ago there were piles of special exemptions carved out for all sorts of things (mostly to buy votes.) These days, if you don't have self-employment or foreign investments, etc and are just the typical paycheque-receiving wage slave, filing taxes is trivial and mostly automatic. The bulk of the complication in the above graph seems to do with the fact that Canada is a highly federal system, with provinces having various relevant powers and oddities carved out as a result of that. That, and the existence federal employment insurance and pension plan systems.
- switchbak 3y ago
  "trivial and mostly automatic" - but not so automatic that it's done for you, as in some other countries. And that's by design - Intuit still wants their cash cow providing that sweet sweet revenue every tax season.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    I don't see how Intuit has any pull on Canadian tax law or influence with the CRA. And there are plenty of alternatives. I used ufile.ca for years, way cheaper. And honestly, just picking up the form and doing it yourself is all my parents did for years. I'm pretty sure we'll see what you're asking for within the next 5-10 years. With them already having the T4s, etc. I don't see why they couldn't have you login to their site, confirm everything, and submit.

rsaz 3y ago

Are there any countries with good, reasonable tax systems? I'm only familiar with Canada and the USA, both of which are a bit of a mess, though seemingly in different ways. I'd be very interested in hearing what the process is like in other places.

dkga 3y ago
Switzerland tax law is pretty straightforward and the cantonal (local government) tax authorities are known for being very helpful in explaining things to taxpayers in doubt, an experience I had more than once.
- bradley13 3y ago
  I dunno, the sheer size of our personal (Swiss) tax return is daunting - and we are pretty ordinary. Maybe not as insane as the US, but "simple" would be different.
jqpabc123 3y ago
The EU has VAT (value added tax) which is added to each purchase. At the end of the year, there is nothing to report and nothing to pay. It doesn't get much simpler than this.
- koliber 3y ago
  The original post is about income tax. While VAT is a tax, it is not an income tax.
  - jqpabc123 3y ago
    The post I responded to asked: Are there any countries with good, reasonable tax systems? VAT is a reasonable alternative to income taxes but neither the question nor my response ever specified "income".
    - ska 3y ago

narrator 3y ago

Being someone who has some experience with tax law, the cycle of tax complexity goes like this: 1. Tax law is passed. 2. Really smart CPAs and Tax Lawyers figure out ways to legally avoid paying taxes. 3. Tax people issue regulations intended to close those loopholes. 4. Administrations change and they want to win votes and tweak the economy so they lower some taxes and add tax breaks. 5. New administration comes in and selectively reverses previous administration's program because of politics. 6. If the tax is international tax, then add really smart tax lawyer doing multi-jurisdictional tricks to lower taxes (e.g Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich[1]) , governments trying to encourage multi-nationals to do business there by adding incentives to their tax code, the OECD coming in and trying to standardize tax stuff across jurisdictions to prevent this, individual pairs of countries doing tax treaties with each other, etc. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/double-irish-with-a-dutch-sandwich.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/double-irish-with-a-dut...

cperciva 3y ago
None of this complexity is from trying to plug tax loopholes. Most of it is from politicians wanting to name things. For example, for decades Canada has had a "personal amount" tax credit -- for arcane reasons, rather than saying "the first $X of income isn't taxed", the lowest tax bracket starts at $0 but there's a non-refundable credit equal to the lowest tax rate times $X. Then a politician came along and said "we should increase the personal amount so that people can earn more money without paying taxes... but we don't want to decrease taxes on the top 1%". So now we have a "personal amount" which depends on your income. Similarly, in BC we have the "BC Tax Reduction" which is an extra tax credit given to people with incomes between (roughly) $22k and $36k. Both of those examples could have simply been implemented as tax brackets but voters get far more excited about a "Tax Reduction" than they do about a new tax bracket.
- p_j_w 3y ago
  >Both of those examples could have simply been implemented as tax brackets but voters get far more excited about a "Tax Reduction" than they do about a new tax bracket. Doesn't sound like the problem is entirely on the politicians here.

bojangleslover 3y ago

[flagged]

piperswe 3y ago
A 401(k) match _is_ free money though. When you leave the company, you can just cash out the account - the penalty will still probably be less than the match gave you, so you come out ahead. Of course, it's best to just let it sit in retirement accounts until you can take a qualified distribution.
- jacobr1 3y ago
  Only in the sense that you can optionally not accept it. But it still is part of your compensation, as is in effect, even the "employer-paid" portions of healthcare and other benefits. From the perspective of the employer they are part of your costs and the direct payments reflect that, likewise you would need to pay those costs yourself if you were self-employed.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    So it's a semantic thing, employees know it's not literally free and comes from their employer but it's free in the sense that it's in excess of their negotiated salary.
- amluto 3y ago
  > When you leave the company, you can just cash out the account You can even get fancy and roll it over into an IRA and, if you have excess cash, convert it to a Roth IRA.
soared 3y ago
Im in the same boat - would you mind explaining to us every other Friday folk why the employer match isn’t free money?
- irrational 3y ago

concordDance 3y ago

I once made one of these for HMRC's self assessment tax calculation[1], it had about a thousand nodes. [1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5dfa35f4e5274a66f4fb5a65/2020_tcg.zip https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5dfa35f4e5274...

CaliforniaKarl 3y ago

It’s charts like this why payroll providers exist. See the relevant _Bits About Money_ post at https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/payroll-providers-power-respect/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/payroll-providers-pow...

j45 3y ago
It's still math and the standardizing to ensure what payroll providers submit is correct is still checked by the government, who could provide said standard.
- worik 3y ago
  When things get complex even the payroll providers get it wrong Where I live (New Zealand) holiday pay got complex, and quite a few civil service payrolls got it wrong (IIRC by a few different providors). It tooke years for anyone to notice, and has taken years, and billions, to put right. Keep it simple. Please
  - j45 3y ago
    Payroll providers absolutely still get it wrong but not always because it's too hard. I joke, but a little serious when I say asking bureauracies to get details correct, quickly and consistently might be too much, let alone with software that could threaten jobs and meetings. Canada had a payroll implementation failure in government that received international attention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system Having implemented more than I've wanted to - too many are still anchored in the past on a mainframe, abstracted away with a web and/or mobile app. Still worse, many payroll providers, particularly one of the very largest in Canada, actually still processes payroll according to a "model" that's manually run. It's an excel model, run manually by people. You deal with people directly. Do anything off a beaten path? Guess which model to win.

juujian 3y ago

Very nice chart. Since the bubbles are wider than they are high, I would have probably changes the direction from left to right. Which in graphviz in theory (but only in theory!) takes just one line.

transcriptase 3y ago

The fun part about being Canadian is that you get to compete with the entire world for remote jobs with Canadian companies, but no company based outside of Canada wants to deal with hoops required to hire a remote employee based in Canada if they don’t already have a presence here.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
busterarm 3y ago
I know one L.A.-based company that hires tons of remote Canadians, especially in engineering, because they're cheaper...but they're essentially a payroll/business accounting company.
funksta 3y ago
Try finding work as a sole proprietor contractor, remotely for a US company. It's cheaper for them vs hiring an in-office employee, and with higher US tech salaries and currency conversion, you'll generally come out ahead too
- j45 3y ago
  A foreign company doesn't need to make it easy to hire an employee who is a Canadian. If there is an advantage to a Canadian to be employed from a foreign company, it's maybe a bit more up to them if they want to do a bit to stand out a lot. A single person corporation in Canada akin to a professional corporation like a doctor or lawyer may have is not out of the question, especially with the advantages it can provide.
ska 3y ago
This is pretty true most places, hiring non contract (e.g. full time) employees in a different country is a pain in the ass. Europe is trickier than Canada, fwiw, on average at least. These days there are a number of companies that specialize in simplifying this, including liability shields, but of course for a fee. Honestly it’s easier to do it as consulting or freelance contracts, but that puts the employee in exactly the same position as OP. Still, for e.g. typical tech jobs an account to sort it all out for you will be maybe 3k or so, many will opt for that.

dangerboysteve 3y ago

Last time I looked at Canadian payroll services, many were very affordable. Why bother spending the time on this ?

robertlagrant 3y ago
Why should calculating how much money to give the government cost money?
- dangerboysteve 3y ago
  Because of the time it takes to record and distribute everything and pay the government.
gus_massa 3y ago
He likes solving almost imposible math problems.
chrisfosterelli 3y ago
Paying for something helps but doesn't entirely free you from a responsibility to understand this flow. Because an employee is going to ask you why they have X on their payroll and not Y like they calculated on their end and then you have to spend an afternoon reverse engineering everything the tool did because "our payroll tool just did it like that" isn't a very professional answer.

jerf 3y ago

Are there any loops? I extend this question to all the people who have posted their own graphs of other similar things.

robertlagrant 3y ago

I think what's clear is that regardless of how complex this appears, we should never blame mistakes or loopholes arising from this complexity on the law makers. Only on tax payers.

j45 3y ago
And the cost.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  It would be nice if accountancy fees were tax-deductible.
  - j45 3y ago
    Corporations can, not people. Maybe because the size of revenue from both groups.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      Possibly. But if they were tax-deductible from people, it'd be a nice downward pressure on more complex rules on getting money from people.

from-nibly 3y ago

The solution is not to automate or codify any of this, it's to remove it. This is utter nonsense. What problem could this possibly solve other than widening the equality gap?

Evidlo 3y ago

Devil's advocate: I have never seen a GraphViz plot that didn't look like spaghetti, so the fact that this plot looks like a mess doesn't mean much to me.

orzig 3y ago

I'm in the US but I'll say for sure that things like this are about half the reason I haven't hired any employees for my LLC. I wish I could, but I'd be de facto hiring an accountant as well!

jweir 3y ago
If you are considering hiring and the hire is a developer or at all involved in research and experimentation make sure you are well versed in Section 174. You could be on the hook for a large tax bill since you have to write off developer expenses over 5 years – this is true whether an employee or contractor. Hopefully it will be repealed* – but if not it is one of those things that no one would expect to exist since it is in the words of Senator Wyden "stupid." https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/174 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/174 * edit It won't be repealed but a law can be created to ignored it until a future date. Once on the books, because of accounting, it is very hard to remove a tax law.
- shutupnerd0000 3y ago
  My guy, you're replying to someone that said theyre not considering hiring
  - orzig 3y ago
    That's fine, I appreciate it! We're all conversing in public, and I'm sure it will be useful to someone. And besides, this information makes me even more happy with an opinion I already have - isn't that what the internet is for?
IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
If you ever consider to, *given the remote work trends*, consider this: I'd place high importance on the employee state to the state you are hiring them out of. Some states are a nightmare to deal with. For example, NJ, CA, NY and OH. Once you are registered in X state, your company is fair game to be pursued for any kind of perceived (lack of) compliance by that state, long after that employee has left you for another job. For example, you could earn a large fine for not filing to report you have no staff in the state. States that I found were lovely to deal with were ID, TN, and TX. Generally speaking, its highly recommendable to hire employees from your state only for this reason. I would not hire unless you are absolutely needing to.

neilv 3y ago

Several years ago, I worked through my US IRS tax return forms by coding the data and calculations in Scheme. The representation ended up being that each form line value was a Scheme procedure that called other such procedures, which was one way to enforce dependencies. (Fortunately, there were no cycles in the dependencies, like the article author found in their CRA payroll deductions work.) I don't have the code handy, but the procedures typically looked like this: (define (form-1234-line-22--foo-income-dollars) 234.00) (define (form-1234-line-23--taxable-bar-income-dollars) (max (+ (form-1234-line-22--foo-income-dollars) (form-1234-line-21--baz-income-dollars) (form-1234-schedule-x-line-10--total-blort-dollars)) 0.00)) It was a lot of work, but (since I used error placeholders for many code paths my own data wouldn't exercise) not that much more work than I had to do anyway, for doing my returns with just the PDF forms and instructions. (The extra work came when I had to enter and double-check the form data manually in the official format, for this one-off exercise.) I did this exercise to see what it would look like, would it save me time/headache, and did it suggest anything about DSLs for this kind of work (say, for domain experts to codify and maintain something more formal and checkable than the form instructions or tax code).

cdcarter 3y ago
Did you take advantage of the homoiconicity of scheme to make this happen?
- neilv 3y ago
  In this case, I was first seeing what could be done with basic Scheme algorithmic programming language mechanisms (e.g., using procedures and the magic of toplevel definitions). Then, after seeing how tax form logic ended up that way, one direction would be to define a DSL that makes that easier to work with. For example, if we find everything can be implemented as these procedures, or with maybe with an additional concept (such as to handle cycles like in the article), a simple first step DSL might be another s-expression language that has magic variables that are more akin to spreadsheet cell references, in that the dependencies are evaluated in order. And it might also do things like populate a hashtable with the cached values for application use (e.g., PDF form-filling). That DSL might be implemented as a simple `syntax-case` or `syntax-parse` transformer. If that works and could, we could optimally make it more palatable/marketable/politic by defining a keywords-and-whitespace grammar that parses by transforming those syntax objects to syntax objects in our intermediate s-expression DSL (which transforms to the basic Scheme code approach we worked out originally). There are other valid ways (say, you want tax law logic to be definable dynamically at run time). Though some involve `eval`, which I discourage. https://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/2014-July/063597.html https://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/2014-July/063597...

sidcool 3y ago

How does one even begin Designing a software system for such a complex process! The impact of a bug in such system would be huge!!

jeffrallen 3y ago
I once spent an hour removing a few cents' error in a salary-computation and then 2 weeks implementing the correct one-time payment to 200 staff in order to make them whole from a couple years of incorrect salaries. The whole thing cost about $2000, so each individual adjustment was small, but we had to do it with transparency and humility to maintain worker happiness.
j45 3y ago
It would need to be flexible, auditable, historical (each year ran it's version). So, basically, no software devs really at the business analysis layer. The process mapping has to be the code. Decision making in the process mapping has to be editable. It's quite doable and present with some of the current software packages that operate in the finance / insurance / banking / government / enterprise space. Imho, how software has historically been created for business is now broken. Software used to aim for a fixed, or slowly changing operating model, and the pandemic kind of introduced a bunch of ongoing change. Software will become more malleable as a result.

jeffrallen 3y ago

Would be interesting to have a constitutional requirement on government to be able to explain taxes to citizens in a declarative language with a max complexity of N bits of information. Railroad unions: you want an exemption for your members? Write a diff and go to war with hedge fund managers to get the bits you need to implement your boondoggle. :) I'm reminded of the "delta this build causes in bytes of flashrom" reports you see at the bottom of a compile job on embedded platforms.

phailhaus 3y ago

Graphs are terrible for visualizing dependencies. Even a reasonable system can "look messy" when rendered this way. I'd be more interested in seeing what this would look like as a tangled tree. [1] [1] https://observablehq.com/@nitaku/tangled-tree-visualization-ii https://observablehq.com/@nitaku/tangled-tree-visualization-...

personomas 3y ago

[flagged]

drchiu 3y ago
A lot of countries trend toward bureaucracy as their biggest “innovation”. Unfortunately, the same people who are in position to change things for the better (ie. to make a country more competitive, innovative) stands to benefit from more bureaucracy, not less.
- pas 3y ago
  there are good bureaucratic innovations (standardized forms, applying service design to forms, digitalization, self service portals, browser based, etc) and then there's the usual problem when good intentions get translated into process, and it fucks up everything. for example US government forms require UX testing (user research), but even the smallest change requires it, and all forms require it. but you can't just use a big pool of preapproved providers or whatever, it goes through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs ... which now is in effect a fucking big roadblock of a bottleneck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperwork_Reduction_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperwork_Reduction_Act https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jennifer-pahlka.html?showTranscript=1 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
patchtopic 3y ago
some valid points at the start, but as soon as the "woke mind virus" is mentioned we know we are dealing with a moron who can't see the forest for the trees - a classic example of Godwin's Second Law
- leemelone 3y ago
  incorrect.
HorizonXP 3y ago
I don’t think the “woke-mind-virus” superlative is conducive to the type of conversation we should be having but otherwise I fully agree. Canada does nothing to promote home-grown economic prosperity. What is the value in adding those taxes and fees on a $10 part? Do we honestly believe that type of protectionism is going to create a bunch of jobs domestically? Our GDP has grown mostly due to real estate. I work in tech and run a software-based business that does very well. But every time I look to secure new clients, I always look south. I haven’t been employed by Canadians in over 10 years.

nb_key 3y ago

Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses (CFIB) has a more simpler template for small business. https://www.cfib-fcei.ca/en/tools-resources/payroll-deduction-tables https://www.cfib-fcei.ca/en/tools-resources/payroll-deductio...

1letterunixname 3y ago

Complexity is a signal of attempted fairness, selective corruption, or bureaucratic survival, stochastically mixed to conceal the latter 2. Canadian and US governments have enough information to calculate taxes for you, but choose instead to impose all manner of additional complexity, cost, and time sink on taxpayers of varying degrees of sophistication because it's tradition. Norway has prepared statements automatically for taxpayers for 20+ years.

Joel_Mckay 3y ago

Doing your own taxes is like doing your own dental work. You will never be able to keep up with the legal, bureaucratic, and financial changes. Whatever a local competent accounting firm charges, they will almost always recover their cost in a commercial return. If you have under 12 employees, than ADP payroll can work in some situation.

nayuki 3y ago
Taxes are a social construct; teeth aren't. Some taxes are simple enough that a grade schooler can do it. For example, very few people would find difficulty in applying Ontario's 13% Harmonized Sales Tax to general retail purchases. Why shouldn't we aim to have an accessible and equitable tax system that doesn't require dedicated experts ("priests") to interpret?
- Joel_Mckay 3y ago
  lol, most fail to understand there is an intricate relationship with the corporate tax and credits system. It is a full time job figuring out the retention of company treasure, handling capital losses constructively, and legal posture preparation to minimize risk. While founders-syndrome tricks people into thinking they can do anything... they can't do everything... and often end up doing nothing when bankrupt. You can learn the hard/expensive/painful way, or do things the easy way the first time to retain more cash to invest back into the firm, If you are an employee filing a T4, and or a shareholder filing your T5... there is still a minefield of mistakes that can trigger taxable events. Depends how much you can legally retain, but the tax systems are often similar to a crime of omission in that it ensures you will miss most opportunities. These rules are complex on purpose. Best of luck, and don't drop the soap =)

SurgeArrest 3y ago

Tax laws as well as other laws, need to have a requirement to be rewritten from scratch and re-approved every 10 years or so, such that no law or regulation is complex enough that an elected official can't describe it in full before voting on it.

AmericanChopper 3y ago
It will never happen. Tax law is complex by design, partially because it seeks to do things that are simply impossible, and partially because anybody with enough power to influence changing it benefits from the complex quagmire of ambiguous laws. The complexity allows the IRS to run roughshod over most people and businesses, but the truly powerful can do almost anything they want if they pay for enough advisors and lawyers. The system is in a perfect equilibrium in that respect. I personally think that if a government fails to enforce a law to a reasonable standard, then the law should be invalidated. Which is probably quite similar to your idea, and addresses the problems created by discretionary enforcement. But that will never happen either.

chad_purposecpa 3y ago

CPA here. Probably can save you a lot of time, if you're in Canada, register for Wagepoint 2.0 and save a lot of grief. It's inexpensive and connects to QBO so your books are happy. Files and remits to CRA by itself. No need to deconstruct with code. Ask me more here: www.purposecpa.ca

mensetmanusman 3y ago

Excited for a future where arbitrary complexity is dealt with by millions of personalized LLMs that completely simplify any regulatory hurdle by grasping an intention and figuring out the rest.

swalberg 3y ago

I used to run a small payroll company in Canada, everything was done in Rails. Call it brute force but every time the rules updated I'd run scraper against the CRA calculator that would calculate payroll across a variety of provinces and pay ranges and output it as rspec. Then i could test that i was compliant and hadn't missed a rule or typoed a value.