I designed and wrote a corporate tax package for a Fortune 100 company in the late '70s. I worked very closely with a brilliant CPA. Together we designed and validated it on 9 months before relational databases were popular. It is one of the 2 or 3 big projects in, my career. It used IBM mainframe for data collection and a Univac that had an early spreadsheet system [Foresight] that allowed a team of tax CPAs to do the forms the IRS required back when. The CPAs could maintain and run it without computer folks intervention. I got Lots of flack from IT peers but it worked for a long time.
It was the 2nd computer tax submission to the IRS. Still had to send 5 copies of paper submission but sent a reel of tape too. Doing a tax system can be done, but it must be maintainable by tax geeks, not just computer geeks. Doing this system got me to understand US taxes. Convoluted.. Yes. Logical.. Yes[once you dig in deep enough]. Every tax simplification act has only added complexity. To truly simplify we must toss out all old rules and start the system over, not just patch on fixes. <>< Jack On Jan 14, 2015 8:25 AM, "Bill Bogstad" <bogs...@pobox.com> wrote: > On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 2:26 PM, Matthew Gillen <m...@mattgillen.net> wrote: > > On 1/14/2015 8:05 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote: > >> Unfortunately there are only a few companies in the industry who > >> produce tax software, and they only Windows and Mac compatible, or > >> you can use the web interfaces. This type of software does not really > >> lend itself to to Open Source. > > > > Why do you say that? Because it requires a lot of specialized knowledge > > that typical CS majors don't have? There are certain projects in the > > open source world that have to pay attention to regulatory issues (e.g. > > wireless drivers), and they seem to be able to do so. > > > > I suppose the tax code is orders of magnitude more complex and > > intertwined. I'd be curious to explore your statement a little more > > though regarding what kinds of things lend themselves to open source. > > It isn't just the complexity. It is the constant churn. Sometimes > because of last minute > changes from Congress, the IRS doesn't put out final > instructions/forms until late Fall. > Admittedly these are usually fairly esoteric issues, but as lots of > people have something odd about their taxes (uninsured medical > expenses, loss due to theft/fire, consulting income, etc., etc.); any > organization putting out tax software has to be prepared to put > out a new version fairly quickly. Plus the software is > geographically restricted. US Federal tax software might be > adaptable to state level returns; but probably won't be at > all useful for UK or Canadian taxes. This just doesn't strike me as > a problem domain that > is very tractable to volunteer efforts. It is also (to a great > extent) an all or nothing problem for most users. If tax software > only handles 2 of the 3 forms that I need to fill out, it probably > isn't worth my time to use it. I'm not aware of any other free > software (or culture i.e. wikipedia) which operates under these > conditions. > > Bill Bogstad > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss@blu.org > http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss > _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss