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Comment by esturk | Hacker News Reader

So that would be the software companies' liability. And such business practice can differentiate good ones from the bad ones. I'm seeing a new business market here even.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

There is zero economic gain from more complex tax rules. Further, the software does not absolve you of liability. At best they may agree to cover it, but that's unlikely and they can also go broke if they get it wrong.

There is economic gain for those collecting it. Of course, how much you can squeeze people and businesses is an everlasting question.

Complex tax does not mean greater tax.

There’s zero national economic gain from _any_ variation in law from state to state, but either you’re in favour of state’s rights or you’re not.

There's a lot of similar problems with having sets of 52 plus federal employment laws.

Its not surprising that one US right wing think tank thought the UK with its "socialist" NHS and higher income tax was a freer place to business.

>here’s zero national economic gain from _any_ variation in law from state to state

Yes there is. States compete with each other and this prevents any one of them from having laws that are much crappier and more oppressive than average because when that happens businesses and people leave.

So competition might prevent one of many downsides to different states having different laws? I don't see why this means there's any benefit to that situation over just having one set of laws?

Depending on your political leaning, you wouldn’t want the same laws in GA as in CA.

That’s a relatively unusual leaning. Most people think their values should be universal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

Not as unusual as you would think, given that it is a basic principle of both the EU (despite what Eurosceptics would have you think) and the US.

You’ve just described variation as a way of mitigating the effects of variation.

There’s a case to be made for variation, but that ain’t it.

The model [1] GP alludes to claims that competition forces small governments to provide better (more efficient, more optimally chosen, etc) local services than monopoly governments, for the same reasons that competitive companies are expected to provide better services at a lower price.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiebout_model

Wrong. You'd move to New Hampshire if this was true.

How do you know I'm not planning to?

States want to collect taxes. Now that they have a consistent policy position, you may see interstate agreements to harmonize collection.

There is already a precedent with DMV data sharing agreements, and some states will collect sales taxes for others as well.

"...and some states will collect sales taxes for others as well."

I'm having a hard time coming up with an example where this makes any sense. Can you elaborate?

Sure. New York and New Jersey collect sales taxes for each other as an example.

http://www.state.nj.us/treasury/taxation/pdf/pubs/sales/prio...

It’s a big deal for cars — without this people in NYC metro would have a hard time otherwise.

Actually, current sales tax software provided by South Dakota and other states does absolve a merchant for liability if used to calculate sales tax due.

I agree with this approach!

Actually, the federal government should oblige each member state to provide the algorithm, and sign it cryptographically and have it expire every X fixed time interval, and have signed algorithms for the current and next time interval, so that software can automatically fetch and stay up to date.

Then the "business opportunity" of navigating FUD evaporates. Currently any such enterprise charging for such a service can spend a fraction of their budget lobbying against harmonization...

Since it would be an obligation of the states to the federal government, these algorithms (provided by each member state) should be hosted on a fixed federal government site.

Time to start a petition?

This would reduce costs of tax collection for all parties.

What is the most convenient format for this layered geographic data? Are the tax district boundary polygons already otherwise available as open data? What do localities call these? Sales tax tables, sales tax database, machine-readable flat files in an open format with a common schema?

How much tax revenue should it cost to provide such a service on a national level?

States, Counties, Cities, 'Tax Zones'(?) could be required to host tax.state.us.gov or similar with something like Project Open Data JSONLD /data.json that could be aggregated and shared by a server with a URL registry, a task queue service, and a CDN service.

While the Bitcoin tax payments bill passed the Senate and House in Arizona, it was vetoed in May 2018. Seminole County in Florida now allows tax payment with crytocurrencies such as Bitcoin:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-seminole-county-florida-to...

> According to a press release, the county will begin accepting Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to pay for services, including property taxes, driver license and ID card fees, as well as tags and titles. The Seminole County Tax Collector will reportedly employ blockchain payments company BitPay, which will allow the county to receive settlement the next business day directly to its bank account in US dollars.

This could also help reduce the costs of tax collection and possibly increase the likelihood of compliance with the forthcoming tax bills!

these are all very good questions, and only a community discussion of people with the right skills and interests can draft a petition, if enough people contribute to the discussion we can make the proposal more reasonable and robust against valid criticisms... but I believe we can make this happen by just starting the discussion. We can bitch on Hacker News, or we can draft a proposal for the different government levels. The more reasonable we draft it, the higher the probability the petition will be a success. I think it wouldn't be hard to argue against this proposal that a legally enforced computation should be open source, i.e. not just the algorithm for the computation but also all the data lists and boundary polygons used in the algorithm...

Nonsense. Your accountant isn't even liable if you're audited by the IRS. They're not gonna give a crap you used some rando SaaS

Which is why the sales tax calculation algorithm should published and cryptographically signed by each state:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17367669

I wonder if a single member of congress knows what the words 'cryptographically signed' means...

I think you are conflating several different types of liability here.

If: i)your accountant messes up due to negligence or worse, ii) you get audited, and iii) it turns out you owe far more than you thought, then you are liable to the Govt for the extra amount owed. The accountant may be liable to you for professional negligence, damages etc. Your damages against the accountant are not the extra amount owed (because it is what you should have paid in the first place), but losses caused by the mistake. In the above scenario, the Gov't may assess a "penalty" and/or "fee" for late payment of taxes, but those fees are usually waived and/or extremely nominal. In the above-scenario, criminal liability simply does not happen. The above is not legal advice.

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