Fwd: Fwd: Modified US "Tax Report & TXF Export" report - need testi

[J. Alex Aycinena]

David,

I'm copying the -devel list on this response.

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 12:14 PM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Alex--
>
> I tested the newest version, and was able to get the txf data to load into TT2007. I believe my troubles may have to do with the fact that in my first attempts to import, I did not include the txf file extension.
>
> I notice that the Tax Options does not include a few tax areas that would likely be useful, and wonder whether I should mention them to you or the Gnucash developer team? Specifically, there are no tax options for Schedule D (Capital Gains/Losses), and there is no spot in the list for California's SDI (State Disability Insurance), which I believe is used in calculating taxes.
>

If you look at the file 'tax.scm' (located in '/usr/share/gnucash/scm'
on my linux system, perhaps elsewhere on your Mac) you will see all
the codes displayed in the Edit->Tax Options dialog. After the code
and before the description you will see that many say 'none', 'parent'
or 'current' but that for all the codes related to capital gains, it
says 'not-impl'. These are for Schedule D, Form 4797 and some of the
Schedule K-1 codes. The prior report did not implement these and
neither does my new version. To fully comply with the TXF spec
requires a format that includes the date acquired and cost basis for
each security.

For California's SDI, there is no code specifically for this in the
'w-2' section of either 'tax.scm' or the latest TXF spec. I suggest
you set up a separate account for this expense and code it to 'N275,
State income taxes' under Schedule A. With the new report, you can
have other accounts also coded to N275, such as, for example, an
account for prior year taxes paid this year with your state tax return
(there are separate codes for estimated state taxes and withheld state
taxes) , and it will add them both up and show you the subtotals.

> WRT the capital gains issue, I recognise that there is a lot of calculating that would optimally be done (e.g., determining basis and long vs. short term gains), but I wonder whether it would be possible to get parts of the information (e.g., the basic transaction information) and allow the user to enter the missing pieces of info directly in Turbo Tax. If that were possible, you would then want to include capital gains income accounts in the export (and would thus need those options in the list).
>

This information is not currently available in gnucash but there is a
lot of discussion among the developers about improving handling of
'lots' as applied to investments and being able to generate the TXF
output would have to wait until this is solved. Each individual lot,
or portion of a lot, that has a different buy and sell date pair,
would have to generate one tax entry for each security.

There is an allowance in the spec to use special codes to provide
partial information, like you suggest, so the user can enter the
missing data in the tax software, but that has not been implemented
either. In 'tax.scm' that is code N810 but in the latest TXF spec it
is code '673'. Notice that in this partial solution, without 'lot'
tracking, the gnucash tax report could generate one transaction for
the sale of a security on a given date that might involve many lots
acquired on different days with different 'bases', so the user would
have to break down one line into many in the tax software. However, as
you suggest, this would still be an improvement over having to enter
it all by hand in the tax software as you need to do now.

So there are three improvements that can be made:

1. bring the TXF spec up to the latest (V041 is the latest that I find
on-line, we use V037)
2. implement the partial solution to capital gains
3. implement a full solution to capital gains once 'lots' have been
enhanced for securities.

I intend to add these to bugzilla but haven't done so yet.

> Just thinking in space here. The report looks good otherwise!

Thanks

>
> David
>

Regards,

Alex