I had to learn Python to pay my taxes | Hacker News Reader

I had to learn Python to pay my taxes

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43 pointsfuo21313 comments

It's an interesting perspective to see a non programmer struggling to solve a real world problem as their first exposure to learning how to program. I can see how it would be daunting.

I used R to create a method to reconcile investment accounts' position cost basis in locally installed Quicken versus the cost basis per my brokerage's online website.

Some minor manual effort required.

The effort turned up a systemic weakness across the whole of the US for stock position transfers when a dividend is retroactively reclassed as return of capital. At an individual level, this system problem causes tax obligation calculation errors. Repeat this across all taxpayers who transferred such stocks in the first 1-3 months of a year.

Going through this right now, albeit with Robinhood. I have to report my earning in Canada and the US, but I have a lot of transactions.

The IRS is okay with the condensed transactions; but the CRA want everything line-by-line. So now I have to scrape my transactions via the "unofficial" Robinhood API because they conveniently don't allow you to export anything.

Any info on this "unofficial" API?

After the time you invest in massaging the data the CRA wants, I’m curious if you would’ve come out ahead with a mature broker (at ~$5/trade).

I got divorced a couple of years back, and needed to calculate something called the Hug/Nelson formula for community property division of NSOs/RSUs granted during time of marriage. I wrote a little python script to come up with the numbers. I thought about trying to monetize it (and other tools for helping tech workers with some of the more complex rules surrounding division of assets in divorce), but I figured getting the results to be accepted as forensic evidence would be a tough road. Plus my code sucked, and I really just wanted to not think about divorce and the legal system for quite some time.

Are tax services around the world going to get absolutely blasted with tax filings containing hundreds and hundreds of pages of API-powered BTC trades this year? What a mess.

They just look at the numbers in the boxes unless they decide to audit you.

AFAIK in Europe you need to pay taxes only when you convert (sell) crypto currency to real currency.

1) Tax laws are completely different for each European country.

2) At least for some of the countries (the once where I'm aware how taxes work) this is not the case: Even if you exchange one cryptocurrency for another cryptocurrency it's taxable. However, long-term capital gains of cryptocurrencies aren't taxable in some European countries.

In Estonia(within Europe) we have this awesome "investment account" system where you make a separate bank account and the tax system is simplified for that account.

Any money you put in, can be taken out without paying any taxes.

Once you've taken out more than you paid in, you just pay income tax and that's it.

You report your "paid in" and "paid out" sum(to/from that one account) to the tax office yearly.

Really makes the whole process simple and adaptable to any investment model.

tl;dr: He realizes he is obligated to report to the IRS his cryptocurrency; the site is in China and he will have to use an API to get his transaction history.

Same but I already knew Python

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