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Swiss Tax Office distributes Mozilla and OpenOffice

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the taxman-downloadeth dept.

David Gerard writes "From Heise (via Mozillazine: taxpayers in the Swiss canton of Geneva are being given a CD with a French version of Mozilla 1.2.1, OpenOffice.org 1.0.1 and tax program GEtax 2002. Rough English translation from Google." This strikes me as a really cool idea. I already get the cards that tell me to file online rather than fill out paper forms, but it still forces me to buy tax software every year.

3 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Terrific! by Azureflare · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is a step that should be made be more governments, to ease the tax process for people who don't want to spend money for a tax program. Jeez, we have to pay the taxes, why do we have to pay for a tax program to pay the taxes??

  2. IRS and corporate welfare by kkirk007 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The IRS this year was considering releasing its own tax software, available for free. Then the major tax software distributors (TurboTax, TaxCut, TaxAct, etc) cried foul..."if you release an electronic 1040 for free we'll go out of business!" and so instead the IRS struck an accord with them that they would give away their product to people with incomes under $30K /year.

    Since when was the IRS responsible to the software companies to keep their revenue stream going, rather than providing a useful tax service to the public?

  3. Why not simplify so no software is necessary? by The+Mutant · · Score: 5, Insightful

    IMHO this misses the fundamental problem; tax codes in most countries are just too damn complex.

    In the United States they've managed to create such a complicated system that with few exceptions, the services of a professional - or the use of sophistcated and costly software - are necessary. This is ridiculous!

    My situation is a little bit more complicated than most since I'm American and live in London. Last year my US tax return alone was 88 pages! Unbelievable.

    And yeah, I have to use an accounting firm to complete my return even though I've got a Masters in Finance. The cost of an honest mistake discovered years later would be far too high for me to risk it.

    So I get to pay KMPG about two thousand Pounds to complete my US and UK tax returns. Great.

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