[fvold]

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 set up to handle tax differently per product.

Not everything is taxed everywhere, so it will accept it without question if someone sets up a product with the tax class "none", and happily log, process and store an order with 0% tax.

Yes, it's a footgun for the inexperienced to be able to accidentally commit tax fraud, but no, the software can't just override the user input and insist that a 25% VAT should be applied to random things based on ... what? The name? A hunch? MaChInE LeArNiNg?

Manual audits are used to discover human error, be it my error in creating the software, or your error in the data supplied to the software. I can create the logs and make them as easy to read as possible, but if you don't read them for three months, that's on you.

[Fr3dd1]

Everything you wrote is correct. But still, if your product does not transparently show and alert such events, overall product quality is in my opinion bad. Dev or lead or product manager should not be ok with this. But this pretty mich reflects current state of software development. Errors and stuff are in way too many cases "ok" to occure.

[Pasorrijer]

I think what the poster is saying is that, as far as the software is concerned there IS no event to alert. You live in the US, but setup the taxes as if you live in the Caribbean? You're responsible for the setup, and as a business owner responsible for either setting it up correctly, verifying that someone set it up correctly or paying the auditors to do that for you.

Yeah it sucks, but the more we try to take the accountability out of the humans and put it into the software, the worse both the accountability and the software gets.

[emj]

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.

[datavirtue]

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.