2.3.15/tax package: basic questions

[J. Alex Aycinena]

On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 1:30 PM, Jannick Asmus <jannick.news at gmail.com> wrote:
> Phil, Alex,
>
> thanx. As far as I understand something needs to be done such that the tax
> code assignments are saved to the sql file.
>
> Another question: How can tax codes elegantly assigned to accounts. Let's
> suppose that we have a table of needed tax information to be assigned to an
> account (via account no.), is there any way to do the assignment in, say,
> sql and save that back as gnucash-xml somehow?
>
> I'm asking that to know how the very useful tax module Alex developed for
> the US tax regime could be extended to other (mine: German) tax reports.
> This is terribly needed for a looooong time. Now it seems to be possible.
>
> Best wishes,
> J.
> ________________________________

Phil,

There is also a book-level 'tax-name' in the same KVP as
'tax-entity-type' that needs to saved. They are maintained by the user
through Edit->Tax Options.

Jannick,

The way tax codes are assigned to accounts is now a bit clumsy (e.g.,
one at a time, or only one to several accounts at a time) and there is
an open bug for an enhancement here that I would like to tackle at
some point but there are other things I would prefer to do first.

The work I did for US taxes could be used a base for improved German
tax reporting but someone would have to step up who was familiar with
the German tax law to do substantial work to make that happen. I would
be happy to work with that person to assist but obviously can't do
anything myself from lack of knowledge (as well as lack of personal
applicability). It should be noted that it is not just a substantial
one-time effort but also implies a commitment to stay with it over
time to keep the information current on a timely basis as tax laws and
filing requirements change. And the changes need to be made available
to users on a timely basis and we really don't have a mechanism for
doing that in gnucash - our recent release cycle record hasn't exactly
been one of 'often and frequently'. We don't have another mechanism to
update reference data like is in 'txf.scm' or 'txf-de_DE.scm'. I have
updated the US data to 2009 but no one will be able to use it until
2.4 is released and by then it will be stale information; people will
want 2010 information but I can't update the data until early 2011
(because it is not available until then) and people will want it well
before April 15, 2011. So ideally a small release in mid- to
late-January will provide that but it's a rather clumsy mechanism. It
would be better if there were an 'Update' button that would fetch the
data from a central server.

Apart from that, I have reservations about the way the US Tax
Reporting is implemented and the locale-based approach that makes it
an either-or situation for a user (e.g, US taxes or German taxes, not
both). The system should be changed so that if someone steps up and
provides tax information capabilities for a given tax authority, a
user can select none, one, or any of what may be available, as their
situation warrants, to apply to a given set of books. After all, while
most users will only have one national tax authority to deal with,
some people have more than one and then there is the issue of
overlapping tax authorities (we have national, state and even city
income taxes that all may apply here in the US depending on where you
live). This is another area that I had planned to do some work in in
the future.

Alex