[Wylug-discuss] HMRC want to see me. Can you help?

[Neil Wilson]

I'm not going to. My focus was mainly going to be on how HMRC could
open its own code, so that we don't have to build yet another
Corporation Tax calculation engine and we can augment (and probably
improve!) the current tax form entry web systems.

The problems HMRC have are not capability, but politicial. The main
problem in accounts software is that the customer and the consumer are
two totally different sets of people. The customer is the accounting
profession, who obviously have a vested interest in preventing the
comliance process from being automated, even though it is a SMOP to do
so. Currently they largely recommend and purchase software for their
clients, the consumers, who then struggle to use it because it is
written for people with a black belt in double entry.

HMRC/government clearly have two strands of thoughts on the issue. If
they believed that accountants are required for compliance, they would
not have developed what they have and would instead require that
everybody merely interface with the gateway.

Yet what they have developed is not sufficient to actually handle
compliance fully. I reckon they are tied by lobby power from
completing the job, and trying to get the commercial software sector
to do the job simply runs up against the customer/consumer problem
again.

In my view the only way to escape the logjam is to seed Free Software
sufficiently so that the correct tools are created free from the
associated political and lobbying that has thus far prevented any real
progress in the area.

On 25/04/2008, Christopher Brown <snecklifter at gmail.com> wrote:

> Please, please, please don't hammer on about how _all_ software should
> be Free and open-source. Keep focused on what HMRC want from it and
> put yourself in their shoes. I don't think they will be looking for
> external development assistance, just the best way of making something
> freely available for people to use at zero cost. So don't waste too
> much time on how software is developed, rather the benefits of an open
> source license and perhaps highlight the difference between a few.
> E.g. BSD, GPL and maybe just public domain.

-- 
Neil Wilson