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Tax Software for Linux?
Bob Cunningham asks: "Is there any US Federal and State Income Tax software for Linux? Normlly, I would just snag the evaluation copy of whichever Win9x product appeals to me (i.e., lowest cost). This year I'd like to try something different: Do my taxes under Linux. My initial searches have failed to uncover a single native tax package for Linux, nor even rumors of any related development being underway. Right now, it seems my only option will be to run a Win9x package under Wine, and hope it is well behaved. Is Win9x/Wine my only option? If so, are there any packages that have already been tested under Wine?" Financial software has traditionally been lacking under Linux, but I'm hoping that someone will soon step up and write something like this.
Fairly hard.
I write stuff like this for work, and it's not 'hard' work, as in, brain teaser type stuff, but it's slow and tedious.
The problem is that you need to test this once done, and you either go through, meticulously, rule by rule, checking everything dependant on that rule, or you enter saved examples, and compare the values the program returns to what was generated by another program, or by hand-calculating it.
Tiny errors, especially in the conditionals (You're allowed this write-off if your wage is under X, and you're single, or married with three or more kids, etc...) are nearly impossible to catch, especially when two or more conditionals modify the same value.
It is possible to write, especially for yourself, where you can ignore certain segments of tax law, like the spousal section if you're single, but the testing involved would make it easier to just do it by hand.
Technically: Easy
Truthfully: Damn near impossible
I think the people who write Kiplinger's and TurboTax are spending lots of money on lawyers and stuff to be sure they cover every possible situation and to be sure that they ask all the possible questions as far as forms that you might need to add to your base 1040.
Werd.
Aren't there some spreadsheet based versions that could be converted to run under the Star Office package?
As for how hard is it to whip one up? You must file the EZ form. I went to software two years when I found that trying to manually balance a couple of businesses and consulting and profit sharing generated 50 pages of paper to be filed. I have enough problems understanding all the clauses without having to figure out all the lines that don't apply to me. The other problem is IRS approved forms printout but I guess some of that can be handled by grabbing the PDFs from the IRS website. The software is nice since I can make a rough pass to get the initial bottom line and then dig for deductions to try to bring it back to a realistic number.
The purpose of these programs is that one group does the work of creating a framework and programming in rules (which are hopefully dynamic so they can be changed every year, along with tax law, without changing major parts of the framework code). Everyone else then benefits from the work of that one group.
Now...Perhaps you meant that this guy should spearhead the development of tax software for us all to use. In this case, you're showing a bit of a programmer's-bias assuming everyone can whip up code. Linux user != programmer, the quicker that notion is dispelled, the quicker Linux can really take on Microsoft.
One last point...The best hope for tax (or other financial software) on Linux may be if Quicken and others produce versions of their commercial software. I support Open Source, but its probably far too early to expect the general population to trust OSS on something where they can legally be held liable for the results the software produces. (The IRS man won't care that your GPL'd software made a calculation error, he just wants his damn money and he wants it now.) The general population, for right or wrong, probably will feel much safer with a known-entity commercial vendor.
PTax98 is a first stab at tax software for Linux. You must have Perl/Tk installed in order to use it. Note this is alpha software, and is not recommended for doing actual tax returns. PTax98 computes the 1998 Federal 1040EZ. No other tax form is supported at present. You enter the data into the blanks and check a few buttons, and it computes your taxes. It doesn't do the Earned Income Credit yet; you can compute that by hand and enter it if you qualify. It does not produce printed output, you must copy the results to an official IRS form.
I have noticed that the most recent release of Wine does an excellent job with running Quickbooks apart from seriously mangling the fonts (which I can't even straighten out with a tt font server) and not being able to print. I'm not to the point where I will trust Wine with this, but it does not seem far off anymore - maybe within the next year. Also, it seems that tax programs are among the things which alot of people have at least been trying to run with Wine, so it is worth a shot - just don't expect to be able to print anything!
The bottom line is that if Intuit would just release a Linux version of Quickbooks and Turbotax, I think I could once and for all rid my computer of that nasty Redmond virus. And, I would bet that I am not alone in this regard.
Has anyone inquired about this? These two things (accounting and tax programs - not necessarily Intuit's) really seem like killer apps for getting Linux onto alot more desktops.
...but I was a happy Windows-free Linux/BSD geek at home (keeping only a DOS partition for gaming), but buckled under and installed a Windows partition 2 years ago for the sole purpose of running Tax software. Today I'd look into WINE or other alternatives, but of course the Windows virus has festered on that machine, and going back would not be easy (and my wife would divorce me).
The bang for the buck offered by these programs is unbeatable, and I've never seen any comparable software for Unix.
If this is to be a free software project, which most Linux software packages are, it would need CPAs on its staff, arguably 53 of them (50 states, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, federal) in order for the project to stay up-to-date. I have found precisely one Linux tax project, PTax98, and it only partially does federal 1040EZ. My suggestions:
I apologize if my libertarian tendencies are thinly veiled.
*** Proven iconoclast, aspiring epicurean ***
It might be interesting to write a piece of crossplatform software that can do everything needed to process taxes and a program to generate the data files w/ this years rules and such. If that is publiclly available IMO it'd be good to contact your congress man to try to get a law passed stating the IRS had to provide the data files themselves as their electric filing plan wasted so much of our money and bombed (the big project, they did luckily make some small improvments).. also if you could email them in I'd be glad. I always lose envelopes and papers I'm supposed to fax before they make it there. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
No!!! Anything but that. We just can't start taxing free software. How would such a system be implemented. In my opinion this would be the sharp downfall of all progress that has been made in the Linux / Open Source Community!
Last year I used www.webturbotax.com. It's a web/java based version of TurboTax by Intuit.
Last year it was free if you didn't want to file electronically. You went through the program with your browser, and when you were done, you download a .pdf file with your completed forms already filled out, complete with all the relevant attachments.
I of course filed electronically, which was (I think) $19.95. It was a deal for me.
Some guy named Chris
Last year we (wife and I) did our taxes via the online Quicken Tax. It worked great, and explained a lot of the really hard things quite nicely.
Though we did it using IE on a Win95 machine, I don't recall there being any ActiveX controls, maybe a little Java/JavaScripting, and Cookies too (I think)...
Chris Means
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Sigs are bad for your health.
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Give a hand, not a hand-out.
There are some good WWW-based tax programs that are pretty good. Most work with Linux's browsers. Last year I used http://www.securetax.com/
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Fro9m what I've seen round here, many of the folks here were not born yet or too young to have had to endure this piece of crap :) Consider yourselves lucky!
Also consider yourself lucky that tv now plays comercials every 10 minutes or so, back then we had to endure shitty shows for a good 30 minutes before a comercial came on. Then, we could walk 10 miles in the snow (uphill [both ways]) to use the outhouse and hurry back (in 60 seconds) to resume watching TV. (AND WE LIKED IT!)
Fish! LipHo
Change the tax laws!
Ideally, we just get rid of them all.
'Impossible!', you say?
'The gov't need funding for *!', you say?
'No one would volunteer time or money to secure the blessings of liberty!', you say?
I say, 'Look at free software.'
Besides, the gov't could also raise revenue by charging per service. 'Simple' example: Notary services. The validation of contracts is an essential service that should be provided by our government. All credit activities (not just credit cards) are contract based. (M)|(B)|(Tr)illions of dollars move around on the basis of credit daily; it is an economic necessity. By charging for credit contract security as a ratio of the dollar amount, the government could surely raise enough revenue to perform its necessary functions. This would also discourage frivolous credit use by consumers.
Live free or die.
Open source tax software is doable, but only with the right team. Here's the structure. The app is *real* generic, with very little data in the binary. Forms and rules live in datafiles (maybe XML), while data for a single instance of a form lives in it's own file. Build the app first and make it bullet proof.
Bazaar-mode comes into play with the data files. The key is, as stated in a previous post, testing the rules. This is where bazaar-mode shines, with lots of eyes looking at lots of pet test cases. But these eyes have to belong to folks who know what they're looking at (CPA's, preparers, maybe even auditors). The forms and rules have to be set up so that non-developers can make changes and sumbit fixes. Project leadership has to be able to turn around releases in nanosececonds. Time presure with tax software is real, and deadlines (April 15) are hard.
My bet is that independent professional accountants who do a moderate number of returns for clients would be the people to particpate in/benfit from a project like this the most. The question is "How do we get them on board?"
BTW, I work on a financial reporting product *very* similar to tax software, so I have pondered getting this package into an open-source model for some time. My company is not ready to take the plunge yet. But if another company, or just a group of hackers can make a project like this work, I believe it would set the stage for many other projects/products to move to Linux.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
It is? Awesome! I hereby announce my intention to take the tax code and fork a new project off it. I think I can convince quite a few folks to join up. :-)
I'll start by adding in a contribution to the ``poor coders' relief fund''. This will neither increase your tax nor decrease your refund, of course. :-)
I'm not sure if you mean have the IRS write the software, or just make a common set of "data files" available with whatever variations in taxes from year to year represented. If you want them to spend your tax money developing software, you're still paying for it one way or the other.
Personally, I'd rather get my tax software from a company motivated by profit. Things tend to be done a lot better than when we ask the government to do it for us.
But if you used it to do your taxes, you did register it, right?
Right?
Do a search on the LeTax project... we had a presentation at CFUG back in June by one of the developers.... I wish I could get you the URL for the project right now, but my notes from that meeting are at home and I'm at work....
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
I used Web Turbotax under Windows. When I attempted to use it with Netscape on Linux, it blocked me for not using a browser on an appropriate OS. I didn't pursue setting up a proxy to pass a fake Win32 user agent. I suspect it function properly. They didn't do anything too crazy.. it seemed to be straight HTML, safe javascript and AWT Java applets.
I'm going to try a bit (a bit) harder this time and see how it goes, out of curiosity.
Of course, Web Turbotax means placing your tax info, including worksheets and calculations, on Intuit's servers. Privacy sentimentalists probably won't go for that, so a locally-executed tax package for *nix--or pure Java--still probably has a niche.
Not sure this would work well as a Free Software project, though. The research involved and the complexity of a lot of the rules might be prohibitive, especially given the undiminished amount of effort that would have to go into updates every subsequent year. To say nothing of the horror of getting the state tax forms taken care of.
I humbly suggest that the core logic of such a project be done as a set of javabeans without the aid of a relational database, so that standalone, web, client-server and other interfaces can be built on top of it, and make it comfortably cross-platform. The Unix/Linux community probably doesn't have enough programming-literate tax accountants to get this done. If it's platform-independent, there would be a better chance of something like this coming together.
With the current XML revolution, it should be possible for the IRS to come up with an XML variant to define the flow and structure of tax forms. I'd think that with a bit of work, they could set it up so that all you need to do your taxes would be an XML-enabled web browser.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Actually, this would sound like a really good open source project to do "bazaar" style. After all, more eyes make all bugs shallow.
Anyone with any thoughts on this?
My journal has hot
We need to keep in mind that tax software is the ultimate antithesis to operating software. (The Magic Cauldron for details.) The requirements change -- dramatically -- every year. Unlike operating software, there's very little accumulated value over time. This means that in effect the only thing you're buying with tax software is a service, and the s/w is just the delivery vehicle for that service.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
and writing a bazaar-based tax package for the FEDS and one for each state, and getting them APPROVED by both the FEDS and each state EACH year prior to Jan 1 would be a monunmental task. It would require efforts from a team of programmers that would number over 50 (the tax packages of states with low populations are just as complicated as those from large population states and would require an equal programming effort). The would have time for coding this and NOTHING ELSE the entire year (so they better make money to feed their spouse and kids). So, would you make a FED program only or add only a few of the states with the larger populations? This isn't a "one size fits all" app.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I am the author of that PTax98 script. Yes, I know it does just one tax form which you could easily do by hand.
But I wrote it as a demonstration. Remember the first tax programs for DOS? They were shareware programs; they didn't contain every form and schedule, just the most common ones; they didn't print something the IRS would accept, so you copied the output onto your IRS form. But they were still a great improvement over doing taxes by hand, and they led to the fancy commercial programs available now for certain other OS's.
A tax form is an algorithm already! It's not so hard to turn it into code. And we don't have to clone TurboTax on the first try; a simpler program could still be useful for lots of people. If a GUI is too much to write, how about a command-line script? You can look at PTax to see how to generate those tax tables without typing them all in -- tax rates are piecewise linear, with roundoffs, that's all.
I'm not a "real" programmer. PTax was my first Perl/Tk script. And I don't have time to do a big project on my own. But I'd love to contribute what I can to the cause. Anybody want a great open souce software project?
I'm sure that Intuit is probably watching Linux pretty closely, but honostly I don't think that the actual *home market* for Linux is big enough for them to make a big return on their investment.
Linux for the home desktop is growing, and there might be more people who are playing with it at home, but it's a long way from making a dent in the Windows/Mac world.
For a company like Intuit it's a numbers game, if the Linux numbers get big enough then they might make a move.
Or you could try Bochs Its slow but it works, even on non-Intel hardware
My journal has hot
way back in 1998 somebody posted this article: /09/27/1847255.shtml
http://slashdot.org/articles/98
I'm a windows user at home for the most part, so I haven't tried GNUCash Has anybody? Seems like it could be a nice alternative to Quicken/Quickbooks on a VM (Free or otherwise).
The men who hold high places must be the ones who start to mold a new reality... closer to the heart - RUSH
The narrow timeframe for getting this done every year means an effort to do this successfully would require a way of making contribution to the rulesets very easy and accessible to as many tax experts as possible.
I like a post somewhere down there that proposes XML-based rulesets. It lets fragments be broken off easily and worked on independently. It lets non-programmers contrinbute in a way that doesn't require double entry when logic is added. It offers a tree sturcuture that can follow the section numbering of the tax codes themselves. Use XML elements for expressing labels, instructions and field specs. Use Xlink to point to field and rule dependencies, and use ECMAscript for the math and much of the logic.
In short, the total cost in time and money is probably higher than the benefit you get from the more full-featured application.
Despite what Microsoft wants you to think, the total cost of ownership of Windows can easily become higher than that of Linux.
Cheers,
Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Jerry explained that to write tax software and get it approved each year for all states and for the fed'rul boys would be a syssiphisian (sorry, sp.) task.
... ahem! ... not as fair or simple as they ought to be.
...
He's right!
This is a good reason to be in favor of massive, radical revision of the tax code -- that is, the fact that it is so complicated that converting it to an electronic form is impossible without such a huge team.
Some magazine (Fortune? Money? Forbes) used to show each year how even tax *professionals* don't understand (or, nicer, "have different interpretations of") the tax code they deal with for a living. They would send identical (hypothetical) tax informtion, like income, investments, capitcal gains, various deductions, marital status, etc., and get wildy different results in some cases from their various test-cases.
I read an interesting book a little while ago, the title of which I think was "Why we must abolish the Income Tax and the IRS." The proposal in this book (which I agree with, as I have not seen any better ideas) was for a national sales tax. I like this idea as it is egalitarian (earn more, spend more, pay more tax; earn less, spend less, pay less tax) and encourages investment rather than short-term purchases. I don't want to get into a discussion of what sort of taxes are fairest, as that's sort of like what sort of cancer is nicest to die from, but
I think most Americans and most people in other places in the world too would agree that taxes are
So that's it
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
The rich stay rich because government guns protect their stuff.
The rich (generally) get rich through creating or investing in government-chartered corporations (and many of the most profitable of these corporations rake in hauge contracts or other forms of welfare from the government), or through government-created ownership of land, natural resources, and "intellectual property" (patents and copyrights).
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
It's in the government's best interest to design and create the software which determines how much revenue it will collect. That the IRS has not already done so is beyond the comprehension ...bloop... of my tiny ...bloop... fish-brain. The revenues ...glug... at stake are ...bloop... enormous.
If I were Joe Legislator, I'd pass a law to do the following things...
And if I were Joe Consumer, I would stay far, far away from any software designed by the same organization that rewards their auditors based on the number of seizures performed. Think about it: the irs exists to maximuze the amount of revenue collected. It would be pretty convenient if their software happened to 'overlook' some large deductions. I guess "fish-brains" aren't good for much...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Stud Zeppelin wrote with some info about states' tax policies, specifically about those with no income tax or a very simple one (RI).
...
Add Tennesee to that list of states without a state income tax. THe current governor, who ran on a "No State Income Tax" platform, is not all-a-sudden enlightened otherwise, and is fighting for one in that state, which (to my pleasure) appears to be harming his political health. I think there is some property tax, or maybe it's on interest, but it's not an income tax
(My dad lives there, I don't, but this info gathered from a road trip through Tennesee several weeks ago.)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
As long as you pick a mature baseline, say 4.08 or higher, or even better 4.51 or higher, making an app targeted to Netscape with HTML, its limited HTML extensions, Java and Javascript is going to need little if any work to run properly across all platforms.. Aged and anemic as the Netscape 4.x series is these days, it's admirably consistent across platforms. You have to push it to its limits and do some obscure things to run into a feature that doesn't work the same between Win32, MacOS and *nix.
Internet Explorer, on the other hand, is full of nifty functionality, but there are major points of divergence between the feature sets and behavior of the Win32, MacOS, and commercial-Unix versions of IE. It should be mentioned that the Solaris/HP-UX version of IE is more closely related to the Win32 version than the Mac version. For all intents and purposes, the Mac IE, while a nice browser, is a product unrelated to the WIndows browser of the same name.
This reminds me of something I read on the GNU site. Under their list of ways you can help the FSF, they mention making tax-free donations. Because the FSF is part of the United Way, you can get many employers to donate matching funds if you "give at the office". The page added (paraphrased), "We especially appreciate matching funds from Microsoft employees." ;)
Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product