[PLUG] Make some tax software...

[donkyhotay]

Except turbo tax is trying to move away from linux compatibility. There 
is another thread on this list where people are complaining about the 
flash requirement of turbo tax. Flash doesn't bother me so much (though 
I'd prefer to be without it) but I've used turbo tax online since I 
first migrated to linux about 3 years ago (and used the install version 
before that). This year though I had to use the 'user agent switcher' to 
spoof turbo tax into thinking I was running IE on windows in order for 
it to let me in. The fact that everything worked perfectly without any 
problems using firefox on ubuntu really bothers me though. I'll accept 
the fact that many companies aren't interested in the linux market and 
don't bother making stuff for linux, but when you have something that 
*is* compatible with linux and you go out of your way to try to make it 
incompatible (and fail at that even), well... it becomes time for me to 
look for another tax service (online or not) which I did this year. I 
would have felt a little better if I had gotten an error or something 
while using turbo tax online (would have meant there was a real reason 
to not use linux with their service) but I successfully used everything 
up to the point where my taxes were ready to be filed and they wanted me 
to pay for the service, I then decided to cancel and go elsewhere at 
that point. Making a FOSS tax program wouldn't be too hard, especially 
since the USA is big enough and it would benefit so many people there 
are bound to be enough volunteers. The problem (as mentioned previously) 
is that in addition to federal taxes you have 50 states with their own 
tax laws along with the unknown number of counties/cities/whatever as 
well. All of these will change from time to time and need constant 
updating. While the USA as a whole is probably big enough to draw enough 
volunteers to keep federal up to date anything below that will probably 
not be kept current or accurate. The only way I see something like this 
working is if the FOSS community built a framework program (as mentioned 
in previous Emails) that connected to a government maintained publicly 
available database which stores information on all taxes at all levels 
of government. This way whenever taxes change due to laws being passed 
the database is just updated and the program can calculate your taxes 
correctly. This way the developers can focus on making certain the 
program remained compatible with the database and interface issues (how 
questions are asked to the user, etc.). Sadly I don't see our government 
being willing to maintaining a database like this even though it would 
help avoid confusion with understanding/calculating taxes even if you 
didn't use our hypothetical FOSS tax program.



Russell Johnson wrote:
> On Apr 15, 2009, at 10:20 PM, Tim Wescott wrote:
> 
>> You're going to spend a lot more time and money on domain experts  
>> than you
>> will on a programming language, particularly when you get to  
>> addressing
>> all the state taxes and potentially the regional (i.e. TriMet).
>>
> 
> For several years now, I've filed my taxes with TurboTax online. On  
> Windows, Linux, and OS X. It worked a treat.
> 
> 
> Russell Johnson
> russj at dimstar.net
> 
> 
> 
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