tax software (was Re:Speech on Linux...)

[James Knott]

Henry Spencer wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, James Knott wrote:
> 
>>I wonder if it's possible to create a standard app that could be used 
>>every year, by reading in a new set of rules for that year's taxes. 
> 
> 
> I wouldn't be at all surprised if parts of the commercial tax packages
> already work that way.  But this doesn't really fix the problem, just
> moves it:  now you need concentrated expert attention to revise the rule
> set each year.  The hard part is understanding the changes to the law and
> their implications, not embodying that knowledge in code.
> 
> 
>>...If that were possible, then Rev Can could provide the rules 
>>that any tax app could use.
> 
> 
> Unfortunately, I think this amounts to asking Rev Can to provide a tax
> app.  There's so much complexity and so little pattern in it that to do
> the whole thing, I think you'd need a program, not just a set of rules. 
> I doubt you could write a rule-interpreting engine that could do the job
> and wasn't essentially an interpreter for a programming language.

No, not the program, just the rules for running one.  As it stands now, 
it publishes the relevant acts for accountants and whoever else can be 
bothered reading them.  How's that different from publishing tax rules 
in a "computer freindly" format, that apps could use?
> 
> (Say you've got things running great, including the complications of
> self-employment... and then RevCan decides that most small businesses
> henceforth have to use the calendar year as their fiscal year.  That
> actually simplifies things, but there's the problem of the transition:
> to avoid forcing existing small businesses to pay two years of taxes in
> one year -- which would wipe many of them out -- there's a complicated
> procedure for spreading the income of the transition partial fiscal year
> out over the next ten years.  Try to imagine a rule engine which can cope
> with that and *isn't* a general-purpose interpreter.  This is a real
> example -- that actually happened -- and this sort of weird complication
> gets added fairly regularly.)

Will off the shelf tax programs handle that?  I'm the first to admit 
that there are some things best left to an accountant, as they're too 
complex to be handled directly by a computer application.  Don't forget, 
those tax programs are written for fairly common tax situations.

Incidentally, my ex works for Revenue Canada, in income tax collections. 
  She's had more than a few tales of people with some strange tax 
problems.  Some of them require nothing less than a tax accountant 
and/or lawyer.




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