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Comment by guerby | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

Unlike, say, the United States, the French system relies heavily on automation. During tax season, French taxpayers log in to the online tax portal, which is managed by the state. There, taxpayers are presented with online forms, generally pre-filled. If applicable, taxpayers can adjust the forms, e.g. by entering extra deductions or credits. Once the taxpayer is satisfied with the contents of the online form, they send in their return. Behind the scenes, the IR algorithm is run, and taking as input the contents of the forms, returns the final amount of tax owed. The taxpayer is then presented with the result at tax-collection time.

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Nowadays, some people (like if they just have French salaries and no tax breaks) can even not look at it at all and their automatic filling will be automatically accepted

Same in Germany, although almost everybody is entitled to something. This must be why you get a default amount deducted for certain things. It must prevent labor-intensive tax declarations for very small refunds.

I built a tax calculator for English speakers, and highlighting that is next on my todo list. Many people pass up on significant returns, especially parents.

Right, I don't really know how it is in other countries, but in France, the subsidies for poor people (that's obviously a shortcut and is more complicated) don't go through income tax but other systems. There is only one thing that applies to everyone which is work-related expanses (like the fuel cost to go to your work), but which has a 10% rebate if you don't declare anything, so you declare only if it's higher than that.

I would guess maybe 20% of people can go through the fully automatic part, but I have no source for that.

Same thing in the Netherlands, if you're a regularly employed person you usually just click 'next' a few times.

But we didnt develop our own programming language to do this though.

The Dutch tax authority has developed RegelSpraak a controlled natural language for defining tax rules that is also formally specified and compilable to several targets.

There is a video of the team presenting how they built the DSL for tax rules in the JetBrains MPS language workbench from the MPS conference.

Case study:

https://resources.jetbrains.com/storage/products/mps/docs/MP...

Video:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_-XMjfz3RcU

The system is the same in the UK, for people who have to do Self-Assessment.

UK taxes are much simpler than French ones.

In France everything is complicated with a huge number of taxes and rules.

In the UK, if you are employed you don't have to do anything. Income tax and National Insurance are calculated and taken at source automatically. Your other tax is the local Council tax, which is also simple and can be paid automatically.

> Council tax, which is also simple and can be paid automatically.

Helpfully my local council resets your enrollment or automatic payments each year, leading one to forget about them until you get a big nasty letter in the mail.

too bad the website is just a copy of the old paper forms in HTML form... Well at least I prefer using the website that to actually filling a paper form! (and being online make it easier to submit corrections if needed)

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