An aside: It’s so absurd that someone should have to collect tax on behalf of a jurisdiction they aren’t even in. One the worst outcomes of Amazon reaching critical mass was their making agreements with various states and countries, making the tax collection moat wider and wider.
My Stripe Tax Story
231–240 of 299 posts
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's funny that, with the importance of tax to government revenue, why do governments not make a habit of funding/creating really high quality tax software for businesses/individuals to use? Increases in collection efficiency have historically been associated with growth of the state coffers (and state's whose bureacracies failed to adequately capture tax had to resort to funding themselves in other ways, frequently…
> why do governments not make a habit of funding/creating really high quality tax software for businesses/individuals to use? In the US, jurisdictional/funding issues are the biggest blocker. There is no federal sales tax, so the IRS can't use its budget to pay for this. State agencies are not going to be able to use their funds to pay developers to add functionality for a different jurisdiction, and ditto for counti…
That said, congress could fund this tomorrow if they wanted. Budgetary concerns apply to executive actions in this arena, but the whole idea sounds like it's necessary and proper for smooth interstate commerce.
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
As it happens, I'm reading this thread while taking a break from writing tax handling in a piece of e-commerce software. It relies 100% on the settings of the application in question, because tax codes and procedures vary greatly around the world, and it's internationally used software. There are even some stores using this software that sell items to and from different countries using the same website, so it can be…
Not AI, just statistics and double checks. In the old days that was done by people that knew what they were doing now it's a job for programmers. Having alerts about too many strange entries in the transaction log/inventory is something I've implemented.
I agree 110%!! This is just a miss by developers who do not understand the use case and business impact. I have rarely seen systems that implemented business logic alerting until after the company has been screwed. Perhaps not even then. It is a disconnect between the developers and the business. Stripe should be sending emails/notifications as invoices pile up in the "draft" state. That edge case was never examined. Total miss and prime example of the move fast and break things world we live in now. I view these services like Stripe as cutesy little services because of this and I would never trust my business to them. Diligence is on you but the marketing department sells the opposite to unsophisticated customers.
Just like everything out of silicon valley, creaky bare bones bullshit with meager support and a total hands in the air philosophy when it comes to responsibility.
As a US customer Eventbrite sends me an invoice/receipt in GBP yesterday. I scramble around looking for an invoice in USD and find nothing despite putting all of my information in pointing to the US. It's like doing business with toddlers.
They payment was processed in USD but there is zero mention of exchange rates or anything. My support option? Contact the poor guy trying to make his life easier by using their service. I have come to expect this vapid garbage unfortunately.
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#234My dad owns a successful chain of bicycle stores in Texas. He’s been in business for almost 51 years and he’s one of the largest bike dealers by volume in the country. He has nearly a hundred employees and a bookkeeper. Despite having a proverbial dozen balls in the air at any time and despite having people on the payroll to do bookkeeping, he sits down at his computer every night at home, logs into the ERP system, a…
OP assumed that Stripe would get it right exactly as they wished it would work, and wasn't verifying it. The problem literally started as soon as they enabled it: "I deployed it on November 6, 2021, the same day that Stripe stopped billing a significant number of my customers, left all their invoices in a Draft state, and didn’t tell me about it." This is just another variant of "cloud first" mentality, assuming that…
> This is just another variant of "cloud first" mentality, assuming that cloud service providers are actually going to be better than you (as opposed to just cheaper) in carrying out these tasks.
I think it is a variant of "assumed correct" which gets me into all kinds of trouble when I make that assumption.
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#235I don't know how Stripe's dashboard looks/works, and whether it easily displays the number of invoices left in "draft" state. But when the author writes about the silent failure here, > No failed API calls (as far as I could tell). I can't help but wonder whether that "as far as I could tell" is carrying a lot more weight than it might first appear. Stripe's documentation under "Collect taxes for recurring payments"…
One thing that's confusing/annoying from the Stripe developer experience is that subscriptions generate an absolutely huge number of webhooks. There's probably 10 or 15 webhooks per recurring payment, and many of those contain the same data. Different pieces of documentation talk about the importance of different webhooks. Additionally, I've never found a good way to easily test webhooks related to recurring payments without resorting to manual testing. I could easily imagine the OP being confused by Stripe webhooks.
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#236There is a massive chasm between Stripe's perceived (for a lack of a better term) awesomeness vs the actual reality. I don't think I have ever had an actual good experience with Stripe Here is a couple of examples - The account manager assigned to us was absolutely horrible. Would not answer emails. Getting information out of him was like pulling water from stone. And our business is a global company with annual reve…
Support has been dreadful for me as well. Had a few false fraud charges claimed on my Substack. Lost every single one. No explanation from Stripe and no opportunity for appeal.
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#237Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not just the “TurboTax” lobby, but also a strong contingent of anti-tax conservatives. One of their approaches to gain sympathy to their cause is to keep making taxes hard. If taxes are hard, the general population will want less of them.
That's not fully true. There is also a contingent of people who like to use the the tax code as a mechanism of policy apart from efficient collection of revenue. Tax credits for education, clean energy, penalties, small businesses, mortage interest, each one of those one-off changes adds complexity, and in total ultimately can make the process dramatically more difficult.
While all of this is true, other countries have a system where the government tells you what tax they believe you owe, and provide the details of how they reached this number.
The citizen can either pay that number, or offer amendments to the details which imply a lower rate (or higher if you're a masochist, I suppose).
That's independent of the complexity of how that number is derived, and in balance I would rather the US (as a citizen thereof) use this sort of system than the one we happen to have.
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a brick-and-mortar business, closing time is when employees (i.e, non-owners) are in a hurry to get the store cleaned up and shut down so that they can go home. They’re tired and they might feel pressured to just get the sale done. Scammers know this and so closing time is a good time to come in and try to pass off a fake credit card with a stolen number. Weekends, when many less-seasoned employees work, is anothe…
That's also the only time (closing time and weekends) for anyone with a job to buy stuff, no? Assuming normal closing hours of 18:00-20:00 o'clock of course.
Yes, absolutely, and this is why fraud detection is often as much art as science.
In the example above, you have someone coming in making a large purchase, which is probably odd if you've never seen this person before (eg: you would have expected them to come in and "kick the tires" and talk to employees a few times before making the actual purchase, even if they did a lot of online research). Plus the non-working card, and being late in the day. Of course, it's also possible that the whole transaction could be legit. If you suspect fraud though you can often do or say things to gauge the persons response. Tell them that for such an expensive purchase you'd really like to tune the bike up and make sure it's perfect, can they come back and pick it up first thing in the morning? Stuff like that, if the person accepts that, or seems to genuinely consider it, it's probably not a fraud sale. If their immediate reaction is "no way", or they get defensive, it could be a red flag.
Re: My Stripe Tax Story
#240My dad owns a successful chain of bicycle stores in Texas. He’s been in business for almost 51 years and he’s one of the largest bike dealers by volume in the country. He has nearly a hundred employees and a bookkeeper. Despite having a proverbial dozen balls in the air at any time and despite having people on the payroll to do bookkeeping, he sits down at his computer every night at home, logs into the ERP system, a…
> if you let this kind of fuck-up go undetected for over three months, you have to at least assume some of the blame and acknowledge that you probably could have caught it if you scrutinized transactions. I work in eCommerce and occasionally there will be something like a script or config gets messed up and an issue with billing will happen. And being the "expert" I'm usually the one called to fix it. I wish I could…
This applies to every industry and consequential process unfortunately. Take something like GDPR deletion requests. Many mid-to-large organizations have automated flows setup to purge accounts after users make requests after very detailed planning with legal and compliance teams. Companies assume this is the end of it and that they don't have to audit and perform maintenance at the engineering team level because it's something that someone in support or another team shoved off the side will own. What you find is one time it's not purging file uploads, other times it's not purging user PII, etc.
This all comes back to how poorly we integrate the solutions we build. The position of engineers is such that a free pass is often given for failures like these that are fairly well obscured from view. Similar failures for different roles within the same companies get treated differently. While engineers hold outsized power, it is very difficult to completely address these issues.