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Bill Gates' Taxes Require Special Computer
NightWulf writes "News AU claims Bill Gates said in an interview, his fortune is so big, that the IRS needs a special computer, because a normal one can't handle the numbers. The IRS must have had to switch from PC's to Macs just for Gates."
If the press could discern an attempt at a joke. Now THAT would be news.
This has to be BS. There are very lareg corporations with financials much more complex than Gates' taxes.
This sounds ridiculous. Do Warren Buffet's taxes need the special computer also?
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
I'd love to see some more detail on exactly WHY they would need a different computer. It's not exactly like 47 billion is a hard number to handle. If it's even true (questionable) I'd say it's probably because their SOFTWARE has some sort of limitation, using low precision numbers or the like, so they had to set up one machine where the software was modified to have higher precision
Well bad part about it is that the rest of us tax payers pay for it...ha ha ha
no sig yet
Perhaps this is more of a statement about our tax code than about Gates's fortune.
If they're spending tax dollars on a computer to do one guy's taxes, I want some of the $30+K I sent to the government last year back. Seriously.
If their automated system can't handle one return, then why the hell don't they just do that one by hand? Lazy bastards.
As an aside, if this story were about Steve Jobs, all the replies would be bitching about how much press he gets.
Anyone else consider that Bill was attempting a joke, but the interviewer couldn't tell? I mean only nerds get nerd humor, right?
My guess is that the IRS segregates the really big fish into a separate system for closer scrutiny. If they are off a tiny bit on a "regular" tax return they might end up plus or minus $50. If they make a tiny mistake on Billy-o's taxes it could be millions of dollars. Plus they probably have an actual team of people going over it, so they may need to let more than one person access a record at a given time, which is likely not the case with their standard system.
I was working on a project at one point to help "High net-worth individuals" keep in touch with their financial advisors, and to aggregate all of their portfolios into one view.
We encountered a bug where the amount of money that Bill Gates had wasn't supported by the software. It's entirely possible that for most taxpayers, they're just using a data type that doesn't count high enough to manage the wealth that Bill has acquired.
The couple's Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a $US29 billion ($38.8 billion) endowment making it the world's biggest charity.
So BG is putting more than half of his money into the Foundation (assuming he's the sole contributor). We may all not like him, but at least he's trying to do some good with the money he's fleeced from us. I just wish I still had the money so I could donate it and get the tax writeoff!
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
My finances are not very complex, but apparently enough that I'm relegated to the long-form return. I've got to search various forms for fields labelled with numbers to copy out numbers and add them together, copy those to other numbered fields into another form, add them together, altogether having to read an instruction for each field that often reads: "refer to IRS document X to see if this applies to you", or "complete worksheet X and if you get a number between -100 and 325, ignore this line". PLEASE, GOD, WHY?!?!
In my wife's home country, all taxes are collected at whatever transaction takes place. At the end of the year, you get a receipt to review. If everything seems in order, you are all set.
Personally, I'd like to see the entire body of personal tax law reduced to 2 pages. If you can't fit it in 2 standard-size pages in 10-pt type, you can't tax it. Further, taxes should be collected at transaction time (payment, sell investment), and the rate ought to be flat and without deductions. Do that, and Gates taxes would look like this:
The IRS has a department for handling corporate taxation, a small sub-department of which is for handling personal taxes for large income/asset citizens. It seems the mix up's occur when the normal tax departments process some of his holdings, and find on their local department network records that no taxes have ever been paid on the holdings, and send out some notices. There's never any names attached to the accounts at processing level, so it probably happens relatively often.
Only on slashdot would the parent be funny.
Just for kicks and grins,... Has anyone noted that those ordinary computers he is talking about run on a common OS?
Because of the fact that some people on this forum moderate anything intelligent as troll, I will leave it to the readers to guess which OS those computers run on. This has to be the funniest thing all day.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
Last I checked, 'evil Bill Gates' does give quite a bit of money away to the poor. Certainly he is no pauper for it, but he is socially conscious. Now, before you flame this post, please seperate your opinion of his firm's software with what he does with his money. He may the head of a lousy software company, but he is also a good philanthropist.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
Why should he have to? Its his money not the publics, he should decide what happens with it.
Life's a bitch, then she kills you.
If I had half as much money as Bill, I'd give more than he does.
It's just too bad for the world that you aren't smart and motivated enough to amass any significant amount of money. Because, if you were, look out world! You'd be one hell of a philanthropist. As it stands now, you'll just criticize other people that are smarter and more motivated than you. That's far easier to do.
I'm glad to see Bill give any money to charity, but one has to wonder with so much more money than he can use, why he doesn't give more.
$29 BILLION DOLLARS isn't enough for you? That's the size of the endowment in the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. It's the world's largest charity. How freakin' dumb are you? Unfortunately though you're probably fairly smart. Smart enough to be jealous of good works that others do but dumb enough to not be able to do anything significant yourself. Except complain. Oh, I bet you're a first-class complainer. You're probably just itching to hit Reply and complain. Or maybe you'll take it out on the next waitress that doesn't bring your fourth free Sprite back to your table fast enough for you.
What a dork you are.
Why would you use floats/doubles at all? Since there's a smallest unit of currency (a dollar if you round, a cent otherwise), why not just use integers?
name someone that gives more money to the poor than he
Another slobbering sycophant. I'll tell you who: everybody else. If you truly cared about charity, the only thing you would care about is giving in the aggregate, not the donations of individuals. And if you consider the harm done to the computer industry by Microsoft's anti-competitive practices, it would behoove you to consider how much more wealth would be available to distribute had the economy not been so adversely affected by Microsoft's monopoly bullying.