[zakpatterson]

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.

[qzw]

It’s not just fixing problems though. The tax code has changes every year, so the software must be updated accordingly, which is a lot of drudgery. Open source can handle drudgery if there’s a big, passionate community. So you’d need a lot of people who are passionate about the tax code and about OSS. I’d like to see that Venn diagram.

[lbriner]

I think this only makes sense to an outsider dev who thinks everything is relatively easy. Tax and accounting is definitely not.

What happens if you fall under two different tax-breaks or if a payment was taken on a certain date which falls before or after a cut-off point? A lot of complexity, that the developers could solve but will not necessarily know how to handle. At least when you submit this to the relevant tax authority, they can spot alarms like this and decide in a reactionary way how to handle it, adjusting tax codes or providing rebates.

There are just way too many things that change too quickly.

That said, I am all for simplification but then you wouldn't need open-source software, you could just do it in a spreadsheet ;-)

[zakpatterson]

It's hard for me to understand what you mean.

First of all I'm one of the maintainers on the project. Handling people between two tax-brackets doesn't seem like a problem.

A spreadsheet might be simple for you dealing with your own taxes, but you can't email your spreadsheet to tens of thousands of people and have them all improve upon it and share it amongst each other so all of them can benefit. That's the vision here, I don't know if it will succeed, but that's what we're trying to accomplish.

[lbriner]

They were just a couple of examples. If they were the only challenges, it wouldn't be a problem but I bet there are 1000s more (different in each country too.) and that target is constantly moving.

When I said simplification, I meant that if governments would ever accept that tax breaks and special cases are massively expensive to the companies who have to keep track of the changes and then pass on those costs to their customers, then we wouldn't need complex tax software and could use a SS. I can't see that ever happening but I would like governments to be on the hook for the decisions that cost business so much in admin/legals.

[UncleMeat]

The consequences of botching it are high, so taking commits from external contributors requires detailed and time consuming reviews.

Further, people don't know what the edge cases actually are at scale. If I go do my taxes and it doesn't account for some weird thing, I simply don't know that this weird thing even exists in the first place to justify a PR to the tax service.

[zakpatterson]

Can you elaborate about consequences?

You might not know the edge case exists, but out of all the people that have that edge case hopefully there is one that does know about it and can implement the fix.

Also I'd be curious to know what edge cases you're thinking about. Many people just have a W-2 and a few 1099s. If someone has a complex business or some other concern they're probably at least partially aware.