GnuCash and Swedish accounting legislation

[Draug]

After being in contact with the Swedish Account Standards Board, they 
effectively said the following (rough translation):

"Generally it can be said that the accounting should be done in an 
enduring way. That means that what has been recorded should not be able 
to be erased or in any other way made unreadable. The recording of a 
transaction in an accounting software in which the transaction records 
can be erased or edited is not done in an enduring way. The accounting 
must be lockable, which means if you use an accounting software there 
must be a function that makes it so that a transaction can not be edited 
or removed - to satisfy the demands of endurance in the Swedish 
accounting legislation."

I've replied with some more questions regarding where they draw the 
line, as I pointed out pretty much everything can be edited or redone if 
you want to. But it still seems I'm out of luck using GnuCash for my 
company. Is there anything I can do in GnuCash to satisfy the demands of 
the Swedish accounting legislation? Otherwise I might have to redo all 
my accounting in some other program..

On 01/18/2016 02:15 PM, Mike or Penny Novack wrote:
> On 1/18/2016 4:16 AM, Draug wrote:
>> After some more research I discovered the day treshold option which 
>> effectively disables me to make any edits after some day, but
>>> According to Swedish accounting legislation, you are not allowed to 
>>> use accounting software that allows you to edit registered 
>>> transactions (where they use Excel as an example), which to my 
>>> knowledge is quite easy to do in GnuCash, even after reconcilation. 
>>> Swedish accounting legislation requires that every mistake is 
>>> corrected with another transaction, and that the mistake is left 
>>> intact in the records.
>>>
>>> Is there anything that I've missed that makes it possible to use 
>>> GnuCash in accordance with Swedish law? I really want to avoid 
>>> switching to some proprietary, cloud-based accounting software that 
>>> costs $12 a month to use.
>>>
>>> Yours sincerely,
>>> Draug 
> No, nothing allows the existence of any software system that can 
> satisfy the intent of those legislators who apparently haven't a clue 
> about what a competent software person could do (to get around 
> imagined protections).
>
> If you are asking whether gnucash can be used in a way that complies 
> with this requirement, the answer is yes. To the same extent that old 
> fashioned pen and ink on paper accounting can << you know, I could 
> always copy over in its entirety a set of bound paper books except for 
> altering certain entries and destroy the first set >> You simply don't 
> fix things by editing a transaction but by entering a correcting 
> transaction (follow the rules).
>
> Tell me something. Does Sweden interpret this law to mean "any 
> computerized accounting shall be done on OUR machines (no physical 
> access to them) and the data shall be kept on OUR machines (no 
> physical access to it).
>
> Look, I used to work for one of the world's largest financials. ONE of 
> the things I did a lot of was to write programs to alter the data 
> outside of the normal security checks (example -- normally the data 
> entered by humans from terminals one at a time and full audit trail 
> produced. Because an error was discovered affecting 150,000 accounts 
> those need to be corrected,  a correction transaction entered. That 
> would be a lot of workers sitting at terminals for lots of weeks. Or 
> somebody like me writing a special program to generate that effect. 
> Now naturally, I would design that special program so that it ALSO 
> produced the same audit trail, looked exactly as if had been done 
> normally. but ......
>
> In other words, if the software is running on a machine that I can 
> access (alter programs if I wish) and the data is being kept on 
> machines that I can access (and trust me, if I can alter the programs, 
> encryption, security hashing, etc. will NOT keep me from altering the 
> data) then the Swedish legislature is fooling itself. Any large 
> Swedish company would have people in its IT shop who could alter the 
> data.
>
> Michael
>
> PS: The software being open software only makes it easier (and legal) 
> to create an altered program (which gets around the security). Just 
> because doing that to proprietary software where you don't have the 
> source code is much harder and illegal does not mean can't be done. 
> I've wielded tools like "monitors" and "disassemblers" in my day << 
> for perfectly legal purposes, having to alter a program that hadn't 
> changed in the previous several decades and the source code lost -- 
> say never made it from card to disk when all the punch card decks were 
> retired >>
>
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