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Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: the official tax filing application in Germany which has been around for a few decades is called "ELSTER" (apronym for Elektronische Steuererklärung, "Electronic Tax Return") which literally translates to "MAGPIE", as in "thieving magpie" ("Diebische Elster"). This is a form of self-irony which is quite unusual for the German tax offices.

OS portability has greatly improved with their online app [0], which is actually very good and easy to use. Before, the only stable way to run their Desktop application on Linux was through wine.

[0] https://www.elster.de/eportal/login

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Having moved from Sweden to Germany I appreciate Elster existing (and not being solely paper based unlike the other many many German beaurocratic exercises one has to Wade through).

However it misses the most important part. In Sweden your tax declaration comes pre-populated with data they already have, like salary/pension/savings/stock sales/etc., and you can either just accept it as it is or make changes to the already existing data.

It's so easy that you in fact just can send an SMS (that is verified to be from you) to the taxation agency saying that their suggestion is right.

Banks send you letter the weeks before with capital gains, interest payments and employers send you letters with totals of taxes paid. They note if anything needs to be done manually.

The total time spend combined for me filing taxes for the last 10 years is less than 15 minutes. And the reason it isn't less than 3 is because I've logged in (using biometrics and password on my phone that is a hardware token to my bank wich is used for instant secure identification) to check that everything looks OK and to add the commuting at least 10 km/day on bike deduction.

In Germany, it's actually similar. You can opt in to include the data submitted for you by various sources and include them in your tax declaration. The only drawback is you need to select each one (salary, basic info, church tax info) to import it into your declaration, and that you need to wait until end of February since that's the deadline for third parties to submit your data.

Also, some things, like capital gains, you don't even need to declare if you used only German brokers, since they are legally required to submit it for you.

It's called "Vorausgefüllte Steuererklärung" (see https://www.elster.de/eportal/infoseite/belegabruf_%28privat...).

Brazil is going that way too. Currently only public servants and people with an expensive X.509 certificate get this pre-populated tax return, though.

In Brazil we have that option, but one must have a cryptographic token accepted by the government to access it. People usually don't have them, while companies are required to have one.

It takes many clicks and requires to wait for a letter once but Elster offers that too (under the term "Belegabruf"). It then prepopulates the tax return with the data they have.

ELSTER is one of the few examples that come into my mind in terms of "software done right": It's stable and "just works", at least for me.

It's first version was released to the public in 1999, so... Yes, ELSTER is around for almost 20 years now, getting constantly refined at least in the front-end.

All in all, it's something you wouldn't have expected here in Germany in terms of software projects from the government.

AFAIK, it is mostly developed in-house, at least the original version was developed by the Bavarian tax office. In my experience, if government software (for schools, tax offices, political participation, etc.) is developed by an external company, the primary objective of the company often quickly transforms from "creating usable software for all citizens" to "drain the most amount of money out of the infinite resources of the federal government".

It still is developed there but they have external consultants helping them.

I have to say that the UK's HMRC web-based self-assessment site has always struck me as being a really good example of tax returns done right.

It presents as the equivalent of the paper form but with many of the fields autocalculating for you, and offering contextual help. Quite nifty.

Yeah its pretty good when you consider the complexity it has to cover.

Here in Brazil the mascot of the Income Tax is a Lion, it's of an old ad campaign the government ran, comparing taxes with lions and saying "the lion is tame".

It's because of an old popular joke in that the government is a lion that will always take a lion-sized bite from your income.

It's really an old joke. On any reference I have ever found, no matter how old, the joke is already old and the readership is expected to know it.

Oh of _course_, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion's_share

Which is obviously intentionally ironic considering that

> The lion's share is an idiomatic expression which refers to the major share of something.

I wonder what other countries tuck these kinds of harmlessly blatant humor in similarly unexpected places. It's nice.

The danish tax authority is called skat. It has a double meaning of taxes and loved one, it's as if the German one was called Schatz/Schätzle, I think it's cute.

Isn't skat more like treasure that's also used for people? At least that's how it is in Norwegian. No idea why taxes use the same word, it sure so in Norwegian too.

In Holland we have the word schat which also means treasure (and loved one).

As an extension of schat we also have schatkist, which means treasure chest, which is also used as the translation for treasury.

When I look up the meaning of schat the dictionary says: A large collection of valuables. I see how an organization gets named after the very thing they are supposed to handle.

skat/skatt is common to danish/norwegian/swedish, and in all countries it means both taxes and treasure. In danish/norwegian it also means loved one, but swedes would miss that point.

The danes have chosen to name their tax authority not "skat authority" or something like that, just "skat" which evokes the friendly/funny pun.

In English, the word "skat" is used to refer to animal droppings.

technically it is spelled "scat"

> This is a form of self-irony which is quite unusual for the German tax offices.

Love it.

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