This has been my main interest for over a decade. I started down the rabbit hole after doing my books by hand throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s and hiring CPAs who strangely never asked any questions. I built a web-based accounting program to automate what I was doing in Excel, and eventually, my corporate taxes. Everything seemed to hinge on the availability of line item data; but getting line item data hinged on the payment processors allowing it to be transmitted and stored. That functionality still doesn't exist today in ACH or payment card formats.
So, being an entrepreneur, I set out to build a new network that would support the functionality, as well as better security features. And I did. But then the California Money Transmission Act intervened thanks to financial lobbyist Ezra Levine and his client, The Money Services Round Table; no other startups or VCs wanted to take on the issue in a coalition; and the California government wouldn't budge. So I sued the State (http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/8l0ickx4/california-norther...), and the judge was apparently so hopelessly confused that he sat on the State's motion to dismiss longer than any other non-stayed motion in Northern District of California history: about four years.
I lobbied in Sacramento in the meantime and got the law changed twice, to the point where it's essentially moot, but there's still 46 others, and via 18 U.S.C. § 1960 it's a federal crime to violate any state money transmission law.
While all of this has been going on, the big players have skillfully ignored the line item data problem and instead attempted to deploy EMV nationwide in the United States at the cost of billions of dollars. But there's no PIN functionality yet, just chips, which are hardly supported uniformly as many vendors balk at "certification" fees for technology that's already outdated relative to smartphones. And startups and their funders, including Y Combinator, have been in a race to see who can ignore (break) the most laws fastest, which has given regulators an excuse to claim that no one has come to them with real concerns.
Last Thursday the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) put out a much-heralded white paper that, between the buzzwords, suggests it might be interested in addressing the outdated regulatory gridlock. See http://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2016/nr-occ-.... Comments are due in May. For now, I've written more detailed thoughts here:
http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20131118.hsgacstatemen...
And all I wanted were my line items.