International Income Tax Info

[Carsten Rinke]

Hi,

as far as I can see the income tax info collection is only available for 
the US.
There is also some German business tax stuff implemented, but regarding 
income tax no international implementation is available yet.

If this is correct understanding then I would like to volunteer to 
implement such a "international" solution. This is not really trivial, 
so I would like to get some feedback if my idea outlined below has a 
chance to find a way into the main trunk before spending the hours on it.

Proposal for a solution:

1. Add a preference variable called "Tax Country" that lets the user 
choose the country for which he would like to declare tax. This should 
not be connected to the locale setting of the computer as for the German 
business tax implementation (I for myself always install my computers 
with english locale but I need to declare my taxes in Germany).

2. Currently the income tax info is collected in the dialog Preferences 
-> Tax Report Options
Rename the dialog to "Income Tax Editor" and move it to the Tools menu.

3. Make the appearance of the dialog dependend on the preference setting 
for "Tax Country".
This enables to display data for country specific tax declaration forms.

4. I am not familiar with the US tax system, but the the current dialog 
seems to be TXF focussed, and I wonder how much this is related to paper 
form based tax declarations. I would prefer a dialog that is structured 
more in analogy to the old school paper form declarations like
1. choose a form from a set of forms given for a certain type of tax 
declaration (here: income tax)
2. choose the line in this form to be filled in
3. choose the column to be filled in (if applicable, e.g. column for 
"husband" or "wife")
4. choose the accounts that are relevant for the selected field

The concept that a scheme report has to be called to eventually display 
the resulting Income Tax Report remains untouched. If the preference 
says Tax Country "US" then the tax info dialog stays as is.

What do you think?

Kind regards,
/Carsten