Motivations:

• Many of us have written our own "ad-hoc" tax programs or spread-sheets, which need to be re-written each year as the tax code changes, etc.. Spreadsheets don't really do, as the number of entries for a given category often changes, and they cannot handle all the conditional calculations required in taxes. It would be preferable if there were a common substrate of routines which would be stable, but which could be used to quickly describe new tax rules.
• By sharing an open-source tax-program, we might all benefit by gaining a more complete and correct package.
• There are several commercial tax software packages, but they are not available for every platform. An open-source package can be used on all platforms, including Linux and Unix.
• There are web-based tax filing options, but there are several issues with them. Some of us do our taxes iteratively as we receive or find statements, not in one shot. And what personal data is being sent across the net? Who is getting it? Storing it? How well are they protecting it? Much more information is at stake here than with a simple credit card transaction. (Social Sec. #, birth date, name, address, income, bank accounts, etc..) There were tens of thousands of identity theft cases last year. Identity theft is becoming the fastest-growing financial crime in America and perhaps the fastest-growing crime of any kind in our society. Experts recommend minimizing the propagation of your personal information. E-file at your own risk.
• As a tax-payer, we expect to understand how our tax is determined. Neither the government's forms, nor the commercial tax preparation packages reveal, in a clear way, the tax equations and the rules used. (As a programmer, I wish to see the unambiguous expressions or code. Consider this Fed-1040-For-Programmers.)
• Revealing the tax-law in concise -easily executable- form enables us to better understand tax consequences of our decisions throughout the year; not just at tax-time.
• The commercial software packages have become invasive. They ask questions which do not seem to affect our tax. On electronic submission, or even paper forms, we have little visibility as to what information was used or passed.
• Commercial software packages have become bloated - often requiring the installation of other packages we may not otherwise wish to do, such as IE7, etc.. These installations may be disruptive of our other software, perhaps breaking other things on our systems, merely for the purpose of, for example, adding video tax-wizards, etc..
• The commercial tax packages are awkward. Let's call the "tax-interview" method "20,000" questions. Partially this is a tribute to the complexity of our tax code itself, and all the special cases therein. (For example, I live in a city and I'm tired of TurboTax asking about my farming practices.) If you accidentally err in making an entry, they sometimes drop into a mode which will ask questions from unneeded forms on all future sessions. Instead, a simple one or two page form, that can be easily traversed and edited with your favorite text-editor, offers many advantages, including the ability to view and print a concise snapshot of your numbers, quick revisions, what-ifs, etc..
• Keep the tax-package simple and modular by being a basic text-oriented program at its core; no graphical interface complexity. Require only rudimentary knowledge to understand/modify the code. (This should not preclude anyone from adding a GUI shell to access it, or incorporating a GUI later. (Which has now been done.))

Hypothetical Comparison

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