UsTaxes – open-source tax filing web application
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Re: UsTaxes – open-source tax filing web application
#2To pick on one of the more recent PRs that landed, I would think easily 80% of the value of "legislation into TypeScript" would be *annotating* that source code with the citation where followers on could verify the calculation and teaching future contributors to fish
Otherwise, I, too, can just make up 1.45 numbers: https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes/pull/422/files#diff-76e87...
The contributor guide spends a lot of words specifying commit format, and then just says "ask in discord" for the actual content of the tax calculations :-( https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes/blob/master/docs/CONTRIBU...
To come back to a technical discussion, I thought the best practice was not to use floating point numbers for currency, and that goes "double" for JS's `Number` which like everything else in JS is kind of loosey-goosey about accuracy anyway: https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes/blob/v0.1.4/src/irsForms/...
Re: UsTaxes – open-source tax filing web application
#3To pick on one of the more recent PRs that landed, I would think easily 80% of the value of "legislation into TypeScript" would be *annotating* that source code with the citation where followers on could verify the calculation and teaching future contributors to fish Otherwise, I, too, can just make up 1.45 numbers: https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes/pull/422/files#diff-76e87... The contributor guide spends a lot of…
It's a great idea, but based on your points it seems like this implementation ain't it
Re: UsTaxes – open-source tax filing web application
#4Sadly, this is a long way from being production-ready. It really does take a lot of work to create a reasonably feature-complete tax preparation software. Purely judging by 2020 standards, since that's what's nominally supported:
* Forms 1099-R and SSA-1099 are unsupported. Retirees, or anyone that took a COVID-related distribution, can't use this.
* Form 1099-G Box 1 is unsupported. Many people took unemployment during the pandemic, and need to report that income on their return.
* Prior-year earned income for ACTC and EITC is unsupported. Many folks earned more in 2019 than in 2020, and could get larger tax credits by computing the credits using their 2019 income.
* Schedule C is unsupported. Many folks have at least some self-employment income. [1]
[1]https://quickbooks.intuit.com/self-employed/report/
As for software I can recommend to an end user:
https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f... https://www.myfreetaxes.com/
And for comparison, a more complete solution from an independent creator:
Re: UsTaxes – open-source tax filing web application
#5only if tax accountants could use github and were eager like SWEs to put themselves out of work.
Re: UsTaxes – open-source tax filing web application
#6I've never trusted my tax information to any website.
Re: UsTaxes – open-source tax filing web application
#7To pick on one of the more recent PRs that landed, I would think easily 80% of the value of "legislation into TypeScript" would be *annotating* that source code with the citation where followers on could verify the calculation and teaching future contributors to fish Otherwise, I, too, can just make up 1.45 numbers: https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes/pull/422/files#diff-76e87... The contributor guide spends a lot of…
It's a great idea, but based on your points it seems like this implementation ain't it
As long as Intuit can lobby for the tax code to be complex and the process to be slow, painful, and manual, there aren't going to be any viable options that aren't just other commercial alternatives to TurboTax.
Re: UsTaxes – open-source tax filing web application
#8Maybe I missed it, but there doesn't seem to be anything about capital gains.
Re: UsTaxes – open-source tax filing web application
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a great idea, but based on your points it seems like this implementation ain't it
As long as Intuit can lobby for the tax code to be complex and the process to be slow, painful, and manual, there aren't going to be any viable options that aren't just other commercial alternatives to TurboTax.
I have not yet become that nihilistic, but I do think it would require a pair of a subject matter expert and then someone with reasonable software engineering chops to pull it off. Starting by not using a dynamically typed language, IMHO
I figure if M:TG can be implemented, surely the tax code can, too, even if it requires an "expert system," or machine learning, or NLP or something other than 1,500,000 lines of C++ or whatever TurboTax is written in
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Actually, that's also an interesting question: surely the IRS doesn't rely on an army of people with calculators and pencils to verify said returns, so I wonder if a well placed FOIA request would cough up their COBOL source code they use?
Re: UsTaxes – open-source tax filing web application
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a great idea, but based on your points it seems like this implementation ain't it
As long as Intuit can lobby for the tax code to be complex and the process to be slow, painful, and manual, there aren't going to be any viable options that aren't just other commercial alternatives to TurboTax.
recently I complained to a coworker about the state not having an equivalent free file fillable forms and he piped back "thank Intuit for that". I thought what do they have to do with any of that? Just seemed totally disconnected to me. Then this year when I was free fillable forms filing and using the Brave browser I saw all this add blocked junk and checked it out and wow it was all stuff from Intuit. I would have never guessed that free file fillable forms is an Intuit product, it's pretty well hidden the relationship. If you dig around the website you can uncover the origins but it's not obvious with any branding and what not.