[GNC] US Bans Free tax Software

[Alain D D Williams]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 11:33:30PM -0500, David Cousens wrote:
> Just noticed this post.
> https://news.yahoo.com/free-irs-software-filing-taxes-191746938.html?fbclid=IwAR3-GIPM3S6SazRqcyKb1Lywu4wMhtWB9Je8YU_cK_usuW4FLf13y07ATJs. 

Here is another take on it:

https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-ban-the-government-from-offering-free-online-tax-filing-thank-turbotax

I don't think that GnuCash would be banned; what is/will-be banned is the USA
Tax service from developing its own free tax submission s/ware; it is not a ban
on free tax submission s/ware being developed by others.

What is clear is that it is corruption at the heart of the USA government, money
being used to buy laws that benefit corporations to the detriment of 'the
people'. This is not unique, neither is the USA unique in this - unfortunately.

End of political rant - sorry.

A comment elsewhere in this thread is that GnuCash does not tax submission or
preparation. I think that this will have to change - probably by development of a
collection of country-specific tax plugins or tax reports. The reason is that
governments in insisting on tax being done electronically AND (in the UK at
least) the relevant numbers MUST NOT be copied by hand, ie you could not copy
from GnuCash to some other s/ware; at minimum export to a file and import
elsewhere would be needed.

Some will think: why use GnuCash if I am going to need to use something else as
well - so we might as well bite the bullet.

> Impact on the use of GnuCash for Tax preparation in the US could be
> profound. Looks like the US government is trying to head the same way as the
> Brits.  Australia has done something similar recently in that one has to
> join a consortium of software developers (at a significant fee) to get full
> access to the information needed to build in software communication to the
> ATO. The ATO no longer publishes the protocols in use and has outsourced
> developmemnt of the protocols to a non-government consortium
> 
> David Cousens


-- 
Alain Williams
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