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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if the tax code itself were written in Python.

  def computeTax(**kwargs):
    .. blah blah ..
    return how_much_you_owe

Of course we all know what comes next...

  from scipy.optimize import minimize

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In 2014, the Policy Simulation Library [1] added a model called Tax-Simulator [2], which is a Python reimplementation of TAXSIM [3][4]. It is available as open-source [5], and designed to let researchers both change existing policy variables and implement new tax reforms in Python.

[1] https://pslmodels.org/

[2] https://taxcalc.pslmodels.org/

[3] https://taxcalc.pslmodels.org/about/history.html

[4] https://github.com/PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator/blob/master/taxc...

[5] https://github.com/PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator

`policy_current_law.json` is really interesting:

https://github.com/PSLmodels/Tax-Calculator/blob/master/taxc...

Looks like the data in there goes back to 2013/2014. I'd love to see older historical policy data.

France has an open source implementation of their tax code [0]. The paper [1] gives an overview of the implementation language, mlang.

[0] https://github.com/MLanguage/mlang [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07966

France has also developed the OpenFisca framework [1] for tax and benefit rules as code, and its OpenFisca France [2] model is widely used (I think significantly more than mlang). We've extended it to the UK [3] and the US [4].

[1] https://openfisca.org

[2] https://github.com/openfisca/openfisca-france

[3] https://github.com/policyengine/openfisca-uk

[4] https://github.com/policyengine/openfisca-us

My team at PolicyEngine [1] is also now further reimplementing Tax-Calculator in the Python-based OpenFisca framework [2]. OpenFisca US [3] includes all tax logic in Tax-Calculator, plus many means-tested benefit programs like SNAP, and some state tax logic (currently only Massachusetts is complete, though we'll finish the country in the next 12-18 months). You can try it in our PolicyEngine US web app [4].

(OpenFisca US is part of the Policy Simulation Library, and it's developed by a number of former Tax-Calculator developers, myself included.)

[1] https://policyengine.org

[2] https://openfisca.org

[3] https://github.com/policyengine/openfisca-us

[4] https://policyengine.org/us

It has been proposed in professional tax forums that this is in fact how tax code should be legislated, using some kind of pseudo-code. Even just using symbols for things such as >=, <, and so on would eliminate a lot of the garbage in the verbal version.

This would be incredible -- it feels like the tax form documentation is written in a dialect of Accounting English from the 50s, and just little things like adding some parentheses to group and/or con/disjunctions would go a long ways.

Nearly every year I don't feel confident that I've filled out my taxes accurately, and it's not for lack of trying.

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