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I would prefer it if any change to the IRS rules must be accompanied by a reference implementation and lots of tests.

• ted_dunning 1y ago
  Tell me how you will write a unit test for determining the percentage of your utilities that is deductible on Schedule C. Or a unit test that determines whether the discussion during a meal with a customer was "substantially about business matters".
  • yencabulator 1y ago
    What percentage of US citizens expense business meals? This is all about automating the simple cases. Anything more complex is an input to the system, the system can still be tested.
  • sowbug 1y ago
    You're conflating determination of factual and legal questions (out of scope) with modeling the decision tree (in scope and useful). The function you ask about would be "getDeductiblePercentage()," and the unit tests would return various hard coded numbers. Actually determining that value for a real taxpayer is still hard. Being able to show how information flows through the US tax code would be useful, even if it doesn't solve all the problems that arise from its intricacy.