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A Canadian payroll dependency chart

daemonology.net

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Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#281

Post by rocqua »

crote wrote: post #232
phpisthebest wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the government should be barred from implementing a law or regulation that requires "reference implementation " to prove it is "possible to implement" If it needs such a thing it is too complex and should be repealed

Over in The Netherlands we're seeing the opposite happen. Seemingly trivial laws are getting rejected because the responsible Ministry considers it "too difficult". In reality it's most likely just politically inconvenient. For example, it was deemed "impossible" to adjust student loan interest rates, because the software would take two years to modify. Either they are completely incompetent, or they are deliberately…

Lots of our dutch bureaucracies have comprehensively failed and are barely treading water. There is no capacity to do the current job, let alone any new changes.

The only way out is by accepting that the current state is unacceptable, and working on a long and slow fix, during which we don't say "this is unacceptable therefore we require immediate changes". This will fuck people over. But not making those changes properly will fuck people over even more.

We might be on an administrative brink. That takes a radical approach to fix.

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#282

Post by viraptor »

franga2000 wrote: post #180
cachvico wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also don't get me started that I can't use an api to get my account details and statements in Canada. Anyone know if there's any ongoing effort to this effect - i.e. to force banks to implement a common API for querying data held in their accounts? A brief search reveals that Canada is of course missing from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking

Don't be fooled by the "open banking" propaganda, we've had it in the EU for years and we're still scraping web apps like in the old days. I tried to get API access to my bank account and was told by my bank that Open Banking is not for physical persons. I tried to the same for my nonprofit and was told that only licensed PSD2 TPPs ("third-party providers") can use it. The national bank issues those licenses, but pro…

I wouldn't even trust the API with the numbers. The CSV and OBX published by a number of banks I used were always broken in some interesting but obvious ways. Minutes replacing months (someone mixed up %m/%M), values with cents appended twice for international transactions, unique IDs in OBX rolling over every month, and many others. Unless the same API is used for their legal reporting, I don't have a reason to expect it's better. Scraping the pages was way more reliable.

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#283

Post by rocqua »

mcmoor wrote: post #267
patrickmay wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All laws should be expressed in code. It would quickly show how many either conflict with each other or are incoherent.

And then there's other comments here that mocks people who think law as code hence you can cheat/glitch through it. They say law in the end is run by humans and there's something called "intent" that will still catch you. Tbf I lean more to law as code side myself and this intent thing sounds like arbitrary enforcement.

Arbitrary enforcement is a requirement for fair laws. It's why the quality of judges matters.

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#284

Post by nayuki »

soared wrote: post #25
bojangleslover wrote: post #21

[flagged]

Im in the same boat - would you mind explaining to us every other Friday folk why the employer match isn’t free money?

Take the perspective of the employer. They receive cash from the sale of goods and services. They have to divide up that cash to spend on the ingredients needed to run the business: real estate rent, supplies, maintenance, and labor. Labor can be subdivided into categories like salary, bonus, medical insurance, 401(k) plans, etc.

In the status quo, 401(k) plans exist and have certain tax advantages, so employers feel compelled to make contributions to the plans. But if you pretend there's a universe where 401(k) doesn't exist at all, then the employer will just have to allocate that cash towards something else - like paying higher salaries, buying better office facilities, or whatever.

Here's a real-life example from a ~10-person startup that I worked for. The company was debating about whether to purchase group health insurance benefits for us. The employees casually talked about how much they actually spent on healthcare each year, and we realized that our average spending was significantly lower than the average cost per person that the company would pay to enroll in the plan. So we agreed to decline the plan and asked the company to focus on cash compensation.

Remember, money is fungible and there's no free lunch.

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#285

Post by burnished »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #211
burnished wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you'd call that the calendar convention if I remember correctly. The one you are referencing is called 30/360 for 30 days in a month, 360 days in a year.

Would different departments within a bank use different calendar conventions?

Good question! I don't know, though it wouldn't surprise me if different products offered by the same bank used different calendar conventions. Calendar conventions are an accounting practice though, so different departments wouldn't interpret the same loan differently due to differing conventions.

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#286

Post by robertlagrant »

j45 wrote: post #151
robertlagrant wrote: post #86

I think what's clear is that regardless of how complex this appears, we should never blame mistakes or loopholes arising from this complexity on the law makers. Only on tax payers.

And the cost.

It would be nice if accountancy fees were tax-deductible.

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#287

Post by pembrook »

narrator wrote: post #18

Being someone who has some experience with tax law, the cycle of tax complexity goes like this: 1. Tax law is passed. 2. Really smart CPAs and Tax Lawyers figure out ways to legally avoid paying taxes. 3. Tax people issue regulations intended to close those loopholes. 4. Administrations change and they want to win votes and tweak the economy so they lower some taxes and add tax breaks. 5. New administration comes in…

You could stop all of this at Step 1 by just having a flat tax. On everything. The loopholes only exist due to the unnecessary complexity of tax laws.

Preferential treatment for investments over labor? No. Preferential treatment for real estate? No. Preferential treatment for corporations over people? No. Preferential treatment for 3-legged nymphs who live in a flood zone? No. …Etc.

Then the market would be free to allocate human efforts to those which provide the most value.

The amount of human productivity wasted over this topic is insane. Millions of people devoted to creating complex riddles and then disentangling and/or manipulating those riddles—-with zero proof there’s any beneficial outcome from said complexity.

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#288

Post by Joel_Mckay »

nayuki wrote: post #280
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #236

Doing your own taxes is like doing your own dental work. You will never be able to keep up with the legal, bureaucratic, and financial changes. Whatever a local competent accounting firm charges, they will almost always recover their cost in a commercial return. If you have under 12 employees, than ADP payroll can work in some situation.

Taxes are a social construct; teeth aren't. Some taxes are simple enough that a grade schooler can do it. For example, very few people would find difficulty in applying Ontario's 13% Harmonized Sales Tax to general retail purchases. Why shouldn't we aim to have an accessible and equitable tax system that doesn't require dedicated experts ("priests") to interpret?

lol, most fail to understand there is an intricate relationship with the corporate tax and credits system. It is a full time job figuring out the retention of company treasure, handling capital losses constructively, and legal posture preparation to minimize risk.

While founders-syndrome tricks people into thinking they can do anything... they can't do everything... and often end up doing nothing when bankrupt.

You can learn the hard/expensive/painful way, or do things the easy way the first time to retain more cash to invest back into the firm,

If you are an employee filing a T4, and or a shareholder filing your T5... there is still a minefield of mistakes that can trigger taxable events. Depends how much you can legally retain, but the tax systems are often similar to a crime of omission in that it ensures you will miss most opportunities. These rules are complex on purpose.

Best of luck, and don't drop the soap =)

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#289

Post by red-iron-pine »

guhidalg wrote: post #173
j45 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canadian mortgages are a bit different than the US. First, they renew their interest rates every 5 years over a 20-30-40 mortgage. Think of it as mandatory refinancing. Unlike the US where a homeowner can lock in a low interest rate for a very long time.

That sounds terrifying. Do people just pay them off within quickly if interest rates rise?

you're usually fixed to a specific payment during that 5 year term. you can't pay it faster without paying a penalty. the bank expects their profit of X and by God they're going to get it.

during the re-up you can throw down extra money, but that's because it's an open contract, essentially.

Re: A Canadian payroll dependency chart

#290

Post by TimPC »

quink wrote: post #260
TimPC wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMT is also completely insane when it interacts with legitimate deductions and deferrals that aren't loopholes. For instance stock options from start-ups for stock that can't yet be sold.

Ah, yes, what a horrible, awful burden the... consults notes... top 0.4% of taxpayers in the richest country on the planet are being asked to live with. I'll go find a tiny violin so I may weep for them. Edit: Hang on. I was wrong, I apologise. It would be a subset of those 0.4%. Now I'll have to find an even tinier violin. Edit 2: Investopedia says "The AMT is charged when you exercise your ISOs, hold on to your sha…

Regardless of whom it applies to, the situation is deeply unfair. I get that the left is fine with being unfair to the rich and doesn't care at all about writing bad policy anymore as long as the victims of the bad policy are not their in-group but for those of us who aren't radicals and do actually care the situation is concerning.

Investopedia is misleading because the tax event occurs before the sale. You don't pay AMT in the year you sell you pay AMT in the year you exercise. With RSUs for example, the default behaviour is a portion of your stock is instantly sold to pay the tax and if you want to you can override this and pay the tax through other means. But with Stock Options in a company that is not yet traded you aren't able to do that. The government is unwilling to take shares as well. Instead you pay AMT based on a fictional VC valuation. This means a software engineer who started early at a company and got a 1% stock package in a company that grows to $100 million can only exercise their stock options if they pay taxes on the $1 million in stock. That's a crazy expense that isn't in any way fair or reasonable, and can lead to people forfeiting their stock options entirely since the stock itself pays for $0 of this expense.

s: I'm sure the left is happy with the outcome that engineers in the top 5% of incomes forfeit a bunch of money to investors in the top 0.01% of incomes. /s

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