[HN Gopher] Open Tax Solver
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       Open Tax Solver
        
       Author : cdjk
       Score  : 91 points
       Date   : 2021-10-05 15:03 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net)
        
       | ludamad wrote:
       | The mathematical part of me thought this tackled some
       | optimization problem with trade-offs related to taxes. Cool
       | software nonetheless :)
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | I hope it is written in a pure functional language, because this
       | seems like the perfect application for it.
        
         | junar wrote:
         | It's written in C. You can see the code here:
         | https://sourceforge.net/p/opentaxsolver/SrcCodeRepo/HEAD/tre...
        
       | unpopularopp wrote:
       | I never understand the text-to-speech guide videos. It's a huge
       | turn off for me, like "oh maybe I won't use this software
       | rather". idk why really, but it just feels so wrong.
       | 
       | Also I know it's money, pennies, but Amazon Polly is kinda good
       | and with a few minutes of EQ touch up you can make it 100% better
       | than the default OSX/Windows text-to-speech
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | nerdponx wrote:
         | Indeed, I generally associate those videos with low/0 effort
         | YouTube content farms trying to make a quick buck on ad
         | revenue.
        
       | throwbigdata wrote:
       | Does it calculate or solve?
        
       | ramesh31 wrote:
       | This is fine I guess for a simple 1040 filing, but I've never
       | seen anything open source that can handle importing and
       | calculating profit/loss for hundreds of day trades across
       | multiple brokerages with wash sale logic. TurboTax for all its
       | warts is still a godsend to me and far cheaper than an
       | accountant.
        
         | sytelus wrote:
         | If you are relying on Turbotax, you are making a big mistake. I
         | think they have stopped improving it much and now just "milk
         | the cow" mode. I can think of 10 thousand improvements but each
         | year they are same old same old. So I went to a very competent
         | CPA just to double check if TT was maxing out. It turned out
         | that I was losing significantly in TT. For example, TT did not
         | identified wrong cost basis that often comes from the brokers
         | like Fidelity. CPA noticed them in a second. TT also failed to
         | make sure I was saving on taxes paid to state by various
         | channels. If you are giving IRS more than $10K in taxes, it is
         | worth finding and hiring a CPA who often charges less than
         | $500.
        
       | johnwheeler wrote:
       | Might consider getting it off ad-ridden sourceforge to lend
       | credibility to an otherwise nice looking project
        
         | rus20376 wrote:
         | ...or maybe it's better to have simple ads supporting a
         | straightforward code hosting site rather than allowing your
         | code to be ingested into some AI model, or whatever other
         | hidden uses, and used against your will by Microsoft?
        
           | marcellus23 wrote:
           | you know sourceforge has inserted adware into downloads
           | before, right?
        
             | jamestanderson wrote:
             | To be fair, that was under different ownership. One of the
             | first things the new owners did after the acquisition was
             | to stop that practice.
             | 
             | [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_s
             | tate_...
        
               | amenghra wrote:
               | Imho their reputation is burned. People don't pay
               | attention to ownership changes or the fact that they
               | stopped that practice (especially since they haven't
               | redesigned the site much, still looks and feels like the
               | old crap).
        
           | milbertson wrote:
           | GitLab is open source and has no ads. It's relatively
           | popular, you can learn more about it
           | [here](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com)
        
             | CameronNemo wrote:
             | Not all projects have the resources to self host GitLab CE.
             | Actually compute resources may not be much, but keeping it
             | up to date with security patches can be burdensome.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | PostThisTooFast wrote:
       | WTF, the only version you can download is the Linux version. The
       | page says Windows/Mac/Linux, but there's no way to select one:
       | https://sourceforge.net/projects/opentaxsolver
        
       | jnsie wrote:
       | How does it handle crypto? So far the tax solutions I've seen are
       | cost prohibitive, getting quickly more expensive as the number of
       | transactions being tracked increases.
        
         | sytelus wrote:
         | Why is crypto so special? Don't you just report realized gains
         | as investment income and let the tax software do its thing?
        
           | teraflop wrote:
           | There are different kinds of "investment income". Selling
           | cryptocurrency (or exchanging one currency for another)
           | generally results in capital gains, for which you need to
           | track and report each individual tax lot along with its cost
           | basis.
           | 
           | In contrast, if you receive a bunch of interest or dividend
           | payments from stocks that you own, you generally only need to
           | report the total from each brokerage or other account.
        
           | junar wrote:
           | A broker typically sends both you and the IRS a 1099-B
           | reporting the details of the sale of stocks, etc. Having this
           | form makes your tax filing relatively easy.
           | 
           | Cryptocurrency exchanges don't necessarily issue these forms,
           | which means that the taxpayer has to report the details
           | themselves. In particular, the IRS wants each transaction
           | reported on a separate row of Form 8949, which may be
           | laborious for those with many transactions.
           | 
           | (Note that an acceptable alternative is summarizing on Form
           | 8949 itself and attaching details of the individual
           | transactions separately. See "Exception 2" at
           | https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i8949#idm140393400093152)
        
         | junar wrote:
         | Short answer is that it doesn't. Form 8949 has zero support.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | rus20376 wrote:
       | This is my favorite kind of Open Source project! It's obviously a
       | labor of love and it has a wide impact. Truly this is for the
       | greater good.
       | 
       | The icing on the cake is that there is a nice TO DO list guiding
       | new contributions.
        
       | joelbondurant wrote:
       | Helping extortion sector low life degenerate terrorists is
       | trashy.
        
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       (page generated 2021-10-05 23:01 UTC)