TXF categories for French tax system

[J. Alex Aycinena]

Parker,

> From: Parker Jones <zoubidoo at hotmail.com>
> To: <gnucash-devel at gnucash.org>
> Date: Thu, 7 Jan 2010 12:34:37 +1300
> Subject: TXF categories for French tax system
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> I saw that gnucash comes with German tax categories and at first glance this appears to be working when when gnucash is started with a German locale.  This led me to wonder whether it might be possible to create something similar for the French tax system.
>
> On IRC Warlord suggested I should contact Christian on this list.
>
> Digging around, the main changes seem to be:
>
> ./scm/txf.scm  ->  txf-de_DE.scm
> ./guile-modules/gnucash/report/taxtxf.scm  ->  taxtxf-de_DE.scm
> ./guile-modules/gnucash/report/locale-specific/us.scm  ->  de_DE.scm
> ./guile-modules/gnucash/tax/us.scm  -->  de_DE.scm
>
> Are there any others I missed?  The diffs don't look very large, but there seems to be a fair bit of duplicated code.
>
> I'm willing to try to create a French version but just wanted to see if anything is already being done in this area.
>
> Cheers,
> Parker

I have recently made significant changes to the US Income Tax
reporting bits that have not been reflected in the German equivalents.
I believe that the German version was done quite some time ago by
Christian as sort of a proof of concept and it hasn't been maintained
- but he can speak to that better than I.

If you want to add French Income Tax capabilities that would be great,
in my opinion. However, I think we should discuss whether following
the approach done for the German taxes is a good long-term solution.
The problem with making it locale dependent in the way the current
German implementation works is that it doesn't handle cases in which
people need to file in more than one jurisdiction - it's an either/or
approach. I think it would make more sense to use an approach where,
if there is more than one maintained jurisdictional Income Tax system
available in the system, the user can select which (none, one or
several) to use and the individual accounts can then be tagged with
the appropriate codes accordingly (i.e., potentially with more than
one code per account). This would accommodate people who have to file
in more than one jurisdiction and, in the US, allow for both federal
and state level reporting as a future enhancement. However, this
approach involves more work than extending the approach done for the
German taxes.

Another problem that the current US Income Tax reporting approach
needs to deal with, is that it is based on the apparently abandoned
TXF pseudo-standard. Intuit used to maintain the TXF spec but the last
one seems to be from about 2004. I just updated gnucash to use it (the
latest spec), as well as added support for corporations and
partnerships using the latest specs for them, but it looks like there
will be no further revisions to these specs. I thought of adding codes
for non-profit organizations, for example, but recent changes in the
US tax form are not reflected in the latest TXF spec, so I abandoned
that effort.

I do not know what source Christian used for his German codes or
whether that source is still valid. What did you have in mind as the
source for codes for French Income Taxes?

Regards,

Alex