Hacker News Reader

Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

> This would solve many problems: The verbosity and ambiguity of human language (tax laws, tax calculation forms in English)

1. It would not, the tax law remains the spec.

2. France does provide an executable encoding of the tax code, TFA is literally a compiler for that.

3. France started to do so circa 2016 (https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/egovernment/document/...) after losing a FOIA-type case, though feelers had already been sent as a governmental agency (CAS) is at the root of OpenFisca (https://openfisca.org/), and by then the prime minister's data sharing and coordination office (etalab) had started using and contributing to it (https://openfisca.org/doc/manifest-history.html)

4. You can use OpenFisca to encode your own country's tax law, or lobby for your country to encode its tax law there (https://openfisca.org/en/packages/).

View on HN

> 1. It would not, the tax law remains the spec.

Unless you rewrite the law to make the code the spec. Indeed, code is probably a better medium for unambiguously communicating calculations.

> 2. France does provide an executable encoding of the tax code, TFA is literally a compiler for that.

But other countries might not do so.

> 4. You can use OpenFisca to encode your own country's tax law, or lobby for your country to encode its tax law there (https://openfisca.org/en/packages/).

This would be amazing!

> Indeed, code is probably a better medium for unambiguously communicating calculations.

Ambiguity and obfuscation are usually intentional. Legislators and individual citizens do not necessarily have the same interests. This is why omnibus bills exist.

Laws (in the US anyway) are "ambiguous" because they can't be changed very often, so implementing regulations are left to the executive branch, and the judicial branch can edit either one however they feel like anyway and aren't programmers.

Yeah I think the slight nuance that some people miss is that many of the regulations in place are interpretations and implementations of more ambiguous laws.

And they are updated quite frequently and implemented quite programmatically!

But the laws also remain ambiguous because the world is an ambiguous place with a lot of edge and corner cases with unforeseen knock on effects.

Definitely agree. Having lawmakers micromanage everything would be a pain.

That said, one would hope

1) the tax code would be one of the least open-to-creative-interpretation parts of the system

2) the IRS equivalent could actually produce this code, rather than legislators

I think the US actually has the preferable solution, which is that it's not a crime to do your taxes wrong. (Most people think it is.)

Openfisca started a bit earlier, in 2011.

Yep, I fixed the timeline a bit after checking out the history page, as my original memories were incorrect. I guess because I'd first heard of openfisca around the time of the lawsuit.

It is my understanding that before it became an Etalab project, it was quite obscure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com