51–56 of 56 posts
only if tax accountants could use github and were eager like SWEs to put themselves out of work.
To 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…
Thanks for that feedback, having source material links in the comments is definitely a good idea. I've added an issue to track that based on your feedback: https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes/issues/458 And another issue about floating point: https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes/issues/457 I have doubts about the floating point issue just because all values on the tax forms are calculated using floats and then rounded t…
https://frontstuff.io/how-to-handle-monetary-values-in-javas...
To 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…
Thanks for that feedback, having source material links in the comments is definitely a good idea. I've added an issue to track that based on your feedback: https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes/issues/458 And another issue about floating point: https://github.com/ustaxes/UsTaxes/issues/457 I have doubts about the floating point issue just because all values on the tax forms are calculated using floats and then rounded t…
I guess that's true if the only kind of contribution one wishes is for React or docker or rust-lang fixes, but the issues list currently contains "schedule E" and "HSA 8889" which don't sound like React or "general purpose" software contributions: they sound like changes or contributions to the tax calculations
If someone on HN has a passion for fixing those items, which section of the contributing guide tells them how to code up "schedule E" in a way that is going to be accurate and have its PR accepted? Saying whether new contributions require an accompanying test, and the testing strategy, seem also just absolutely beyond critical to me for a tax calculation system
Maybe all of these are, in fact, covered in discord. I grant that I'm just not a "hop into chat" kind of person, because I find it chaotic, the search is usually oppressively terrible, and it means someone needs to be available at the same time that I have the question
Sadly, 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 dur…
Thanks for those points. How would you suggest prioritizing implementation of each item? It has been nice working with new contributors that have specific knowledge of such issues. The core team is two people, and we're lucky to have new contributors come with specific knowledge in different areas. So, ideally, we could wait for someone with domain expertise to come along. Failing that when have time we pick off the…
If this is only dozens or low hundreds of person-hours, then just do things at your own pace. Don't worry about releasing a viable product. I'd guess that you find adding tax forms fun. But it's probably not fun to update every form each year, respond to bug reports, and handle other support requests, all under the time crunch of tax season.
(As a side note, if you want real impact with a time commitment in this magnitude, consider being a VITA volunteer! https://www.irs.gov/individuals/irs-tax-volunteers)
Of course, if you have thousands or ten thousands of hours instead, you should be able to support everything I listed, plus the features you'd find in other tax software. With that amount of time, you should be able to do enough market research yourself to figure out what to prioritize.
Your government should just offer something like this. In my country I just check the data they collected to make sure it's correct (and until now it always has been) and click 'OK' - taxes done.
That’s an oversimplification. For example, how do you expect your home government to know about incomes/dividends/gains that you earned in other countries. And that’s just one example.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...