[ale] Rant[ish]: government and states requiring proprietary software

[Derek Atkins]

"mike at trausch.us" <mike at trausch.us> writes:

> On 09/17/2012 01:44 PM, Neal Rhodes wrote:
>> Well, if we're going to get into a snit about it, let's consider that if
>> you are a corporation, you must file an IRS 941 report each quarter
>> regarding your wages.   You have two choices:
>
> My payroll processor does that; I don't yet have the software written
> for us to be able to provably handle payroll, and I therefore defer that
> liability to a third party for the moment.  I am planning to move away
> from their services in a year or two, once I have the ability to write
> the code and also have a definitive and correct list of all appropriate
> tables...

Ah, and therein lies the rub.

One reason GnuCash does not have a payroll module is due to the
complexities that is "the payroll deduction".  It's not only extremely
locale specific, but then you have deductions that are pre-tax,
post-tax, pre-tax only for certain taxes, deductions with a cap, ....

It's NOT a simple problem.   Moreover, AFAIK there is no authoritative
electronic machine-readable version of the tables.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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