Open Source Tax Products? 719
sub7 asks: "That time of the year is upon as again: Tax Season. Those of us living in the U.S. are busy fumbling with various forms with awkward names and meaningless garble on them. Being a lazy BOFH, I went to H & R Block to see how much it would cost for them to prepare and file my taxes. They estimated -at least- $175, if not more! I knew it was cheaper to buy some software to handle my taxes. So I headed down to my local office supply conglomerate and picked up Turbo Tax 2004 Premier for $69.99. Being an OSS user for nearly 6 years I have never even considered an OSS tax solution product (probably because I ph34r t4x s34s0n!). So I turn to Slashdot to ask: Are there any projects equivalent to Turbo Tax or the other tax products out there for the OSS community?"
Just do it! (Score:1, Insightful)
I've never had to do my own taxes and have it take more than an hour... usually much much less. Definitely not worth spending money on.
Anybody with half a clue... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why?
They aren't needed.
If you go to irs.gov, they will link you to several services which will enable you to prepare and electronically file your taxes online, completely free of charge. Most won't file your state taxes for free, but then, many states allow you to file for free on their own website.
I didn't pay a dime this year, and I didn't have to print out any forms. And yes, I have a reasonably complicated tax return.
Re:This dpesn't seem likely (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if there was an OSS product, I dot know if I would trust it, comercial software is still better in some cases, and this is one of them. If you get audited by the IRS/CCRA and it was because of the software, who are you going to sue? sourceforge? freshmeat? not likely.
Thats my 2c.
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if TaxCut or Turbo Tax has a defect like that, the company agrees to assume responsibility for calculation errors.
TaxCut Deluxe is $25, and the state version is $20 with a $20 rebate. If you don't want to spend the money, you can easily use a spreadsheet & calculator to figure your taxes, and waste 5-6 more hours in the process.
Would you want to use an OSS tax program? (Score:5, Insightful)
Would an OSS tax software project have deep enough pockets to provide the same sort of guarantees? Because I think for many people to place their trust in an OSS tax preparation package, they would have to have some assurance that the results weren't going to either get them audited or thrown in prison.
Perhaps if there was a CPA out there who could also hammer out code
Re:This dpesn't seem likely (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely, Insanely, Mind-Bogglingly Complex (Score:5, Insightful)
The tax code is updated every year.
Unless you're looking at a fairly trivial tax calculator, trying to write and maintain an Open Source, Community-Driven tax program would be a positively Herculean undertaking. It'd dwarf the Mozilla and Apache projects. If you are looking at a fairly simple tax program, then you can probably wrap your taxes up by hand in the time it takes to download, install, and do your taxes on your PC.
What's more, code errors and oversights can mean audits, overpayments, smaller returns and penalties for your users.
Re:umm... (Score:2, Insightful)
So I'd have to say I call it "nothing."
Re:Would you want to use an OSS tax program? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This dpesn't seem likely (Score:5, Insightful)
even if there were... (Score:3, Insightful)
if H&R or TurboTax make mistakes, you can hold them responsible. at least, they will give you the guarantee. i dont think anyone would stand behind any OSS programs when it comes to IRS liability.
not to sound judgemental, but if you are talking about saving $70 to $175 as being a "big deal," i tend to suspect that it's more of your laziness rather than complications that's preventing you from trying/using the IRS electronically fillable forms, available for free online.
Re:Just do it! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got small business income, two mortgages, interest income from my bank account, a W-2 from my day job, a W-2 from my wife's old job, and the unreported student stipends my wife receives as a grad student. You figure out how to file long form with a dozen-odd extra schedules tagged on in under an hour, by hand, and you've got yourself the single most profitable invention/business plan known to mankind.
Kids: Remember, don't take tax advice from a guy who thinks it's OK to just not do your taxes if you're not a government employee. We have a name for people like this. They're called "future inmates".
Re:This dpesn't seem likely (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This Actually Brings Up a Point (Score:3, Insightful)
People will gladly pay the $50 or so it costs for tax prep software, but never the 50 cents or so per person (I'm guessing) it would cost the IRS to provide this service itself, as it reasonably and naturally should...
Re:This dpesn't seem likely (Score:3, Insightful)
Gov Should Release 1040 XML (Score:4, Insightful)
I slogged through the instruction booklet for a weekend, reading, entering numbers, etc. and agonized went I got diverted into ancillary worksheets hidden in the booklet. Talk about stealth bureaucracy!
But think about the Line by Line process of filling out the tax form. It's just a bunch of notices and instructions which could naturally be recast into any programming language that can print out a descriptive text, accept numerical input values and do simple arithmetic.
Most of the entries could be answered with "This doesn't apply to me - enter zero." as default answers.
In the longer run, releasing a programming language version of the tax form makes sense because the same 1099 forms that are sent to the IRS electronically could be made available to you as you fill out the form (assuming you can identify and authenticate yourself).
No, it shouldn't be SomeVendors closed proprietary solution..
The IRS should release the 1040 form in XML.
Re:Absolutely, Insanely, Mind-Bogglingly Complex (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Would you want to use an OSS tax program? (Score:3, Insightful)
and they don't cover that.
Re:Accountants Pay Form Themselves (Score:3, Insightful)
I consider this a pervasive myth. It is true only if you are in a profession that would allow you to earn wages for unlimited hours. Most well compensated people earn 40 hours a week worth of salary, and either aren't paid overtime or aren't permitted to work OT and aren't willing to get a 2nd job. If you happen to be an exception to the rule, that's great, but it isn't the norm.
I do agree there is an intangible value to free time--after all, time is a finite quantity and you never know how much is left. But for most people their free time doesn't represent economic value, and their sweat equity does.
Re:http://www.turbocash.co.za/ (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:http://www.turbocash.co.za/ (Score:3, Insightful)
There are some things worth paying for (Score:4, Insightful)
I could see it as a possibility as a collective effort by a few companies. If there were enough organizations that saw a benefit in having an open source development effort, then they could put together the resources to do it. Having said that, who would benefit from free tax software? Certainly not intuit, or H&R block, or pretty much any tax accountant on earth.
Maybe the IRS could sponsor something like this, but realistically it's far more efficient for them to let TurboTax be the de facto standard. The price for TurboTax is very reasonable compared to the cost of an accountant, especially if you use the web version of their software.
Re:No federal sales tax! (Score:3, Insightful)
As it should be, maybe moreso. I hate it when people whine about the rich getting taxed more. So what?
Look at it this way: here's the money we have to buy groceries for two weeks for a family of four, I have $1000, and you have $100 . Now we are both taxed, I'm taxed 30%, 'cause I'm richer than you are. You're taxed 10%.
I have $700, you have $90. Get it?
"How about this: a regressive income tax system that takes the poorer at a higher percentage but lower amount than those with more income than, then? You'd see prosperity abound in the US. That's Economics 101."
Uh huh... Yeaaaah. You want to just go ahead switch to a channel other than Fox, okay? Try Animal Planet.
Re:This dpesn't seem likely (Score:3, Insightful)
However, if the IRS makes a mistake with a tax question, you are freed from penalties and interest on the mistake. Yes, you still owe the tax you would have owed anyway, but you aren't going to jail either...
This seems like a fair compromise to me.
SirWired
Is it possible to mod the whole topic Funny? (Score:4, Insightful)
As you may recall in many discussions of the pros and cons of switching from Win to Linux, tax software is always on there. That and the lack of games are the really big software holes that may not be filled for quite a while. The only reasonable solution available (or soon to be) is probably online versions of it through TurboTax.com. Hopefully they are web compliant enough that they can run on other browsers than IE.
It would be bad (Score:3, Insightful)
I think a federal property tax would be even more of a disaster than a federal sales tax that did not exclude food and clothing.
Re:There are some things worth paying for (Score:3, Insightful)
If they would just simplify the tax code...like a modified flat tax...would blow away the need for H&R Block, Turbo Tax and the like...just need a calculator to figure the % of what you made....and send it in....
Oh... (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that a vast amount of legislation is incorporated into our tax code. You know how ever time the Republicans want to offer something as a tax credit rather than as a new pay out? That's just another few gallons of quagmire for our tax code.
Let's say that tomorrow we had a flat tax. What would happen to:
* Deductions for children
* Deductions for interest on home loans
* Deductions for business expenses
There are thousands of little deductions that have been put in there over time for purely political reasons. Tossing it out would have some pretty harsh ramifications. The effective price of homes and hybrid cars would go up. The effective price of having children would go up.
A flat tax is a simple solution to a complex problem which means, in the end, it doesn't really work.
Where OSS doesn't work (Score:2, Insightful)
Tax preparation is a classic case where OSS doesn't work: a tedious problem, lots of state-by-state variation, huge sets of rules that are constantly changing, customers that need hand-holding because they don't understand the underlying rules, and the result is just numbers, not something exciting like a game or yet another media player.
Programmers aren't motivated to provide tax software for traditional OSS principles. The only way to get people to do this is to pay them.
Re:Oh... (Score:2, Insightful)
You might also reference the article in my sig...
Now to pick apart your article:
This is idiotic. Read this week's Time magazine, in which Jeffrey Sachs, an economist focused on ending extreme poverty, defines 3 types of poverty:
* extreme poverty -- living on < $1/day
* moderate poverty -- living on $1 to $2/day
* relative poverty -- the people who are living below the average income level of a nation, which hence means that fully half of EVERY nation lives in "relative poverty"
Read the term "relative" and consider its meaning. Relative to whom, and to what? Relative to people 100 years ago, even the poorest of the poor in America live rather well, what with air conditioning and TVs around for comfort and entertainment. But compared to the present-day rich? No, of course not. They never have, and never will. There will ALWAYS remain people who are "relatively" poor and "relatively" rich.
So for UNICEF to claim that 40-50m children live in "relative poverty" in developed nations is, at best, a deliberate and self-interested misrepresentation of the realities of economic life.
So the very definition of who lives in poverty is one which necessarily promotes equalization of income -- or, communism. After all, "less than half the national median" must always produce values of around 25% of the population, no matter what the actual incomes of the "poor" are. Hence, they can continue reporting, until all incomes are equivalent, that "25% of people live in poverty." It's a bullshit calculation on UNICEF's part.
Then there's this gem of contradiction:
But only 2 sentences later, the article notes:
So let me get this straight -- we can't rely on the free market, and yet, child poverty dropped in the U.S. in the 1990s when we relied on the free market to provide better employment and higher wages to people? Ummm...
And to tie back into your question about "Reaganomics", which jelly-bean-loving President was it who initiated the economic reforms in the U.S. which set the stage for that economic boom which decreased the child poverty level noted in the article you pointed out? Hint: his son by the same name (but considerably different political stripes) is now a talking-head on MSNBC...
This much is true. But the problem does not automatically therefore require government intervention. Economic growth, along with the support of private charity, given a culture which supports it sufficiently, can work as well or better than government in supporting those in need.
The real problem is our culture -- we have a culture that for the last 10 years or so has been spending literally 99% of its paychecks, rather than saving with some 8% or so as has been historically the case. People have become individually fiscally less-responsible, and that is with regards to not only saving for retirement and their childrens' college (at perhaps the oh-so-horrible deprivation of not being able to have an 80" plasma TV), but giving to charity as they see fit.