[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.