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Comment by wiml | Hacker News Reader

For the past ~decade I've mostly been using OpenTaxSolver, a file-based open source US tax utility. It's worked for my uses.

It'd be appealing to try to factor out the underlying translation of the tax code and IRS form layout into some very simple DSL that could be used by multiple kinds of software.

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You might be interested in the French example, if you don’t know already. They designed the Mlang DSL for tax calculation, and released a bunch of things on GitHub.

Here is the compiler: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03002266v3/document

https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang

They’ve also open sourced an official calculator, along with web APIs: https://github.com/openfisca/openfisca-france

I agree, at some point I may try to factor out the tax calculation portion and add it as an external npm package or similar.

The only similar thing I could find was https://www.npmjs.com/package/taxee-tax-statistics but that package has some security vulnerabilities and does not seem to be actively maintained.

You could just reuse the code from opentaxsolver and run it through emscripten. Here's an old version I made a few years ago: https://github.com/jfim/1040.js

Thanks! I'll check it out

Yes, having a simple and well defined DSL it might help with tax planning. The difference is it allows one to optimize taxes under certain objective, instead of just enter numbers and see what comes up.

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