Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

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The french initiative started in 2013 is still alive (last commit a few days ago), and passes the gov test suite (they keep in touch with our version of the IRS): https://github.com/openfisca/openfisca-france

The way we got this is interestingly twisted.

French citizens requested the software used by the administration, and they managed to get it!

But, it was written in Mlang, a proprietary language created by the french administration in the 90: https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang.

Someone then decided to create an OCaml compiler that takes mlang and emits python: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07966

As a result, we got Open Fisca. I now think there are other techs in the mix...

A slide of the story: https://www.slideshare.net/Etalab/opening-up-the-french-tax-...

But I believe it should be mandatory for the state to provide the source of every softwares they use internally to manage our lives. Also a test suite to allow any citizen to validate their own effort to comply with the law.

Just like laws should be published as diff of the previous laws, in a VCS repo.

I am French and I never heard about this project. I pay taxes on the taxes web site where everything is filled in for me, so no need to use any software. The whole exercice takes literally 30 seconds.

This is not to day that the software is not useful (the API looks great after a quick reading), but it will be used by a very small population.

I don't use it either, but there is a lot of value in it because it forces formalism and transparency, and allow reproducibility for something as important as taxes.

France has no State/Provincial level taxes. They also do not tax global income.

These add major complexities to the US tax code.

If those represent major complexities maybe there can be open source tax software that serves 80% of people, I.e. people in coastal cities that have one job, and then the remaining 20% have to pay for their software?

So sure. You can write software that can handle a simple Federal-only case. (Basically what used to be a 1040-EZ: W-2(s), a couple 1099s with all the cost basis info existing, standard deductions, etc.) But, at that point, your taxes are pretty simple to fill out anyway and I'm guessing there are even spreadsheet templates out there that let you type in some numbers and everything is calculated.

Moreover, the simple cases are also supported by the IRS free fillable forms product. https://www.freefilefillableforms.com/

Note that this isn't "the IRS." It's an IRS public-private partnership that people below some income threshold can use for free.

No, it’s usable by any income level. You’re thinking of Free File, which lets lower income users use TurboTax and other products for free.

https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...

> Free File Fillable Forms is the only IRS Free File option available for taxpayers whose income (AGI) is greater than $72,000. Taxpayers whose income is $72,000 or less qualify for IRS Free File partner offers, which can guide you through the preparation and filing of your tax return, and may include state tax filing.

Yes. I misread. Though it's understandable how one could confuse Free File Fillable Forms eith IRS Free File partner offers.

As a comment upthread said. It's presumably legit because it's linked to from the IRS site but almost everything else sets off alarms.

The IRS could not come up with a website and TLD that sounds more like a scam if they tried. :)

Yes, although you can get to it directly from the irs.gov site it does seem confusing at first that it’s on a .com

https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...

My experience of state taxes over 32 years (WA, PA and NM) has been that filing these returns is easy-peasy compared to my federal return (I'm self-employed).

I'd be happy to have a full federal filing system even if it left me to do my state taxes "by hand".

> My experience of state taxes over 32 years (WA, PA and NM)

One of those states (WA) doesn’t belong in the list of states that require personal income tax returns, unless you mean something else?

It's been 24 years since I was in WA :) I forgot they had no income tax. Sorry.

There certainly can be if you want to develop and maintain it.

The states don't do the taxes manually, either.

Just like France, they could open source their software.

The US could stop taxing global income for individuals. US companies don't have to pay taxes on their overseas profits, why do people?

US companies do have to pay taxes on overseas profits, which is why they so often have subsidiaries based overseas. Those entities do not have to pay those taxes.

It's a distinction without a difference.

A regular US person gets a US tax credit for taxes paid to foreign governments. But if that's less than they would've paid to Uncle Sam, they still have to pay the difference here.

That's not true for these overseas subsidiaries. That, as you said, is a major reason these subsidiaries even exist (I'm sure local laws also require them in many cases, but still).

The subsidiaries will always exist - most countries require an employer to be a bona fide local legal entity of the right kind; e.g. an American company cannot have an Italian employee; they can have a self-employee Italian contractor, but not an employee - and the laws of “who is an employee” aren’t that simple (even in the US, as you can see in the case of Uber)

And their existence guarantees that tax burden will be optimized globally, rather than locally - the nontrivial price of setting up and running a subsidiary has been paid, so of course it will be used to get benefits as well.

I think I already acknowledged that local regulations might require a local subsidiary. It's the different tax regime for these subsidiaries (i.e. there's no "pay Uncle Sam the difference between the local corporate tax rate and the US corporate tax rate") vs for individuals, that I'm objecting to.

This is great. Do most French people need to file tax returns? When I lived in Britain I only needed to file when I was self-employed and when I worked in Norway I got sent a pre-filled tax return. Now living in the US I need to file every year (both state and federally) even as a regular employee with all my income reported already reported to the government.

It all seems to be an absurd charade. Attempts to reduce the bureaucratic burden are opposed by the tax return return companies who bribe heavily to prevent any simplification.

French employees also get a pre-filled tax return, they just need to check that it is correct.

In Algeria, we have "retenue à la source". Taxes are withheld and paid by the company on behalf of the employee, so you don't need to do any taxes. The company takes care of social Security payment and taxes, and it appears in the tax returns of the company, and the employee's pay stubs. The organization's accountant or accounting firm takes care of it.

You don't interact with the revenue service as an employee, or fill out forms, or something.

In the U.S. this "withholding" happens as well. Regular employee paychecks already lose a chunk of nominal income attributed to various buckets, federal and state and maybe local level. Toward the beginning of the next year comes the grand reconciliation though, where what you "really owe" gets computed, only roughly matching what already is withheld. There are so many rules, exclusions, exceptions, additions. They individually make some sense, or did at some point, but are very confusing, with implications that sometimes stretch over many years.

The US uses its tax code(s) to try to implement policy. Increase taxes on something to try to discourage people from using/buying/participating in it. Decrease taxes or offer tax credits to try to encourage something. On the face of it, this is not a bad idea, but cumulatively it gets pretty messy (especially when, as you note, some of the policy-as-tax-code has implications over more than just a single tax year).

>some of the policy-as-tax-code has implications over more than just a single tax year

Yes, as my finance professor used to say, make all of your decisions based on after-tax.

Which is very relevant on a personal level to, say, someone buying a house in the US with a sufficiently large mortgage to itemize deductions is going to be... unhappy if that deduction suddenly gets snatched away.

"Rules" obviously do change but there are good reasons to exercise restraint with respect to established rules that led individuals to make substantial commitments on the basis of that rule.

You're not wrong with this take. One of the biggest policies is encouraging having children through all the various credits and writeoffs you can do with having children.

It's true that tax filing companies lobby to prevent improvements to the tax filing system in the US, but this is also aided by political parties that argue against things like taxation in the first place, which is why there is no bipartisan support to address this issue.

Keeping taxes hard to pay is an important carrot in keeping the public mad about having to pay them in the first place. It's governance through dark patterns.

> Keeping taxes hard to pay is an important carrot in keeping the public mad about having to pay them in the first place. It's governance through dark patterns.

I am pretty sure the reason most people are mad about having to pay taxes is the thousands/tens of thousands/hundreds of thousands of dollars of their income that is taken from them.

On the high level, I always felt fortunate that I was in position to have to pay a lot of taxes. But it's pretty ridiculous. Case in point, we just bought a small, 100 year old house on a tiny lot. New York State didn't hesitate charging us a "mansion tax" on it. Believe me, it's no mansion. While there's a limit to how mad I am about that, it's not the paperwork that's annoying me.

If they were easy to pay, hard for wealthy taxpayers/corporations to avoid, and actually went to services you'd expect in a developed industrial society (healthcare, education, research) instead of Raytheon XJ-9 Knife Missiles(tm) people might not be so salty about paying the 4th lowest tax rate (as a % of GDP) in the OECD

Put another way, we are at the lowest tax rate this country has seen in a century. How much lower can we expect it to drop?

> I am pretty sure the reason most people are mad about having to pay taxes is the thousands/tens of thousands/hundreds of thousands of dollars of their income that is taken from them.

Perhaps this depends. In the USA, perhaps. In Iceland, not so much (https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1355490017288867841).

In the USA you have to pay your taxes and then you have to pay for your public insurances, where in most of Europe these are the same things. And perhaps tax payers in the USA are not happy with this. So to amend your statement, perhaps a more accurate one is: Most people are mad about paying taxes because of the thousands of dollars of income that is taken from them without any tangible benefits.

I bet if high taxes for high level of public service can work anywhere, Iceland is it. The population is small (350,000 people) and highly homogeneous. One Icelander is similar to another so problems are more common.

US is vastly larger. New York City alone has 3X as many public school students as Iceland has people. We are vastly diverse ethnically, culturally and geographically. It is much harder to find "problems and solutions everyone agrees to" in the US than in Iceland.

That is hardly it... The US population largely agrees that the military budged is way too bloated, that infrastructure spending is way to low, and there is a general lack of a single payer health care system and tuition free public schools.

I’m sure you’ll find way more happiness towards paying taxes in the UK and China then in the USA despite being as diverse and even larger then the USA.

> income that is taken from them.

Taxation exists in every functional modern democracy and there are no viable alternatives to it. States and municipalities that reduce their revenues through tax cuts wind up relying on things like speeding citations and civil forfeiture to bridge the gap. Wouldn't you rather suck it up and pay once per year than potentially having assets seized by a random cop that you then have to go through the legal system in order to get back? You're gonna pay either way. Even in anti-tax states like Texas, people get hit with massive property tax bills because it's one of the only ways that the government generates revenue.

The real problem is that the vast majority of people don't really care once the money leaves their hands. You don't like the mansion tax, which makes sense, but have you taken the time to look at your state or city budget to see where all of this money is disappearing to? Because that's where the more of the focus needs to be. Just glancing at the executive summary of the latest NY budget(0), it looks like $86B of the $212B total goes towards Medicaid alone.

So do we just leave the poor to not have healthcare? Why does healthcare cost so much and how come despite all of these tech entrants into the healthcare space, the cost never seems to go down? I really hope for the sake of your own argument that you don't work in healthcare, because what that industry is doing to communities across the nation in terms of cost is nothing short of outrageous.

[0] https://www.osc.state.ny.us/reports/budget/review-enacted-bu...

If you are an employee, usually you just have to approve it on the internet, since it's taken directly, every month, from your salary.

Even as a freelancer, it usually takes me 10 minutes on the web to fill my yearly taxes nowaday. It used to be way longer, with queue at the tax offices, real papers to fill, etc.

But I do have a very convenient status, administrative wise.

I don't understand how "not having to file a tax return" can work. How does it account for all the information a government might not reasonably have about your wealth and economic activities? How do you apply for tax credits? The taxation system is not particularly intricate here in Switzerland but there's absolutely no way a government that is not an orwelian surveillance state would have the required information about each person to pre-file their tax return.

In both the US and UK employers have to report earnings and banks / brokers have to report interest and investment income to the IRS/HMRC. Do the Swiss tax authorities trust citizens to correctly report their own income without any verification?

In the UK the government communicates your tax code to your employer payroll department to tell them how much tax to withhold on your earnings (taking account of tax credits etc.) Banks have to withhold the basic rate of tax (higher rate tax payers must file, but that already excludes 90% of tax payers from worrying about it.)

In the US the system seems similar except the government doesn't let your employer know how much tax to withhold so you fill in a form for your employer with the information that gets it mostly but not quite right (so long as you don't switch jobs that year!) Filing taxes as a regular employee ends up being substantially more complex than filing taxes as a self-employed person in the UK where the government provides an online system much simpler than that provided by the tax filing companies in the US (otherwise print and mail several different PDF forms and do the math yourself, fortunately if you get it wrong the IRS already knows what you owe so at that point they'll just point out the corrections and tell you what you owe...) And this beurocracy is of course all doubled because states have their own completely separate set of rules.

French people have to file tax returns, it is pre-filled but you still need to check and sign it. It is also the simplest case.

French tax law is actually very complicated, I guess like just about everywhere. If your only revenue is your salary, and you don't have a lot of deductibles, all you need to do is sign the form (electronically). But if you are self-employed, it is highly recommended to hire an accountant if you don't want nasty surprises if you get audited.

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