Open source tax compliance
January 28, 2008
This will get James Governor’s attention. I’ve been having a few Twitter conversations with Phil Hodgen who last week called me from Switzerland but unfortunately I couldn’t take the call. Today in a Twitter post he said:
I’m talking about doing to tax compliance what wordpress did to publishing
Heh - open source tax compliance, I like the sound of that. Unfortunately, I can think of 16,000 tax practices that would hate it. Then I’m thinking but isn’t that where we’re heading anyway? In the good ol’ days you were lucky if you got a transaction engine, today you get that plus some output, then you have to shoehorn it to an accounts production system and then out to a set of tax engines.
We’ve still not cracked reliable online submissions but it’s creeping ever closer.
Prediction time - 2 years max and compliance, at least for the very small business, will be automated to the point where compliance costs tumble to near zero.
BTW - I like this fellow. He comes out with really good advice (although he’d probably kill me for saying so) like:
Pain and agony of doing another form + relatively low tax savings + audit risk = don’t bother. Resolve to spend an extra hour of time in marketing your business and move on. You will make more money.
How many professionals out there would say as much? Very few I’d venture to suggest. We’d rather feel as thought we’d added net present value.
Technorati Tags: tax avoidance
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Thanks for the post, Dennis. More to the point, thanks for that magic phrase “open source accounting” that helped focus my ideas.
Dennis/Phil
Whoa!
Open source tax compliance? Now that IS radical. And I thought I was a game breaker banging on about open source ERP.
Martyn