The US government is always honest and most assuredly will make their software with the end user in mind. Combined with the excellent customer support offered by the IRS and the US government's proven track record in creating stable software used by millions, this would be the best solution.
Sarcasm aside, the IRS customer support is excellent.
10 years ago I had some special tax situation that the two tax preparers I consulted were not familiar with. They took the safe route in preparing the paperwork. So I called up the IRS support line and a specialist talked with me in detail about my situation and told me the proper way to do it and it saved me $5k in taxes.
Yes, software can be much simpler if the real world wasn't so complex. The reality is that governments use taxation as one of their tools to reward certain behaviors and population segments and to discourage/punish others. Simplifying taxation is taking that power away from governments. Why would any government choose to divest itself of those powers?
I don't think any other country does taxes as awfully as the US. Where I live, there's a government provided portal that has most of the stuff already filled from my employer. It gets "complicated" if I earn income from the side such as investments, contract work etc and even that is just a matter of filling forms on their website in a similar manner to how the author suggests filling fields in an Excel sheet and oth…
Sure, but the US also generates about 40% of it's income from personal income taxes, compared to ~25% average across OECD
My guess reading this (and my experience growing up in India) is that many countries simply ignore income taxes (if you're the average schmoe with a regular job and salary, you pay taxes. If you are a business person of some sort, you simply accept cash, hide your income and pay no taxes) and the country makes for this shortcoming with a 20% VAT.
I worked on tax software and have seen these kind of efforts. Noble, yes. Short lived, yes. It’s relatively easy to make a free 1040 file. The real problem comes from all. The. Edge. Cases. 1) do you support xyz state? 2) what if I lived in multiple states? 3) what if i… And on and on. And it’s not just one and done. Every year IRS and states are changing their shit so you have to go thru and make all kind of updates…
Open source can solve this problem.
Any service you choose might be missing your edge case. But if you can see all the code and figure out where to plug in your edge case, then you can contribute it for all users in the future to enjoy.
We've already seen people show up and implement features we hadn't researched yet. I encourage you to check it out.
The US government is always honest and most assuredly will make their software with the end user in mind. Combined with the excellent customer support offered by the IRS and the US government's proven track record in creating stable software used by millions, this would be the best solution.
Sarcasm aside, the IRS customer support is excellent.
I can confirm that. I once had a problem with business tax, called them and I was surprised how well they treated me and gave advice.
The effort should be focused on forcing states to standardize their tax code and states/IRS to provide a simple filing service. If the answer to what’s blocking it is “some corporations wouldn’t like it” then it can’t be that big a problem
I don't think any other country does taxes as awfully as the US. Where I live, there's a government provided portal that has most of the stuff already filled from my employer. It gets "complicated" if I earn income from the side such as investments, contract work etc and even that is just a matter of filling forms on their website in a similar manner to how the author suggests filling fields in an Excel sheet and oth…
Sure, but the US also generates about 40% of it's income from personal income taxes, compared to ~25% average across OECD https://files.taxfoundation.org/20210217111150/Sources-of-ta... from https://taxfoundation.org/us-tax-revenue-2021/ My guess reading this (and my experience growing up in India) is that many countries simply ignore income taxes (if you're the average schmoe with a regular job and salary, you pay t…
I'm not sure the OECD is the right comparison point because many OECD members (the Latin American and Eastern European countries, mostly) collect far less in tax revenue than the "more developed" OECD nations like the United States, France, Germany, Sweden or Japan. To use your example of India (I know India isn't in the OECD but it has good tax data, has been studied extensively, and its tax regime isn't miles away from the "less developed" OECD nations) - India collects somewhere on the order of 10% of its national income every year in taxes; the other countries mentioned are in the 40-70% range. For a country that only wants to collect 10% of its national income in taxes it's easy to get away with the (relatively simple) mechanism of consumption taxes; to collect more revenues increasingly progressive forms of taxation, such as income taxes, are required.
I bought my first Linux distro in a box on a shelf in a store.
Be serious.
I am serious. And Red Hat had $3.4 billion in revenue the year it was acquired. There are plenty of people getting paid to write open source software. The top contributors to open source projects are frequently for-profit companies. Open source != hobbyist.
There’s nothing about paid software development that requires source code to be kept private.
