Mike The article was a lot clearer than the headline implied about the intention of the legislation as were a couple of others I later found. The situation with regard to the powers of government is different in both Australia and the UK and the US. We have privileges extended to us rather than guaranteed constitutional rights as such. The powers of our government particularly wrt to personal liberty are limited and established much more by legal convention/case law rather than specific clauses of our constiution than in the US.
The tax office in Australia has a web portal for individual tax payers into which we can enter information. Our tax office collects a lot of information on individuals directly from employers, banks, superannuation providers etc and a lot of what they have collected can be preloaded into your tax return. We can also submit through registered tax agents. Our tax office did create tax software which you could download and use on your own computerhowever that has been deprecated in favour of the web protal and commercially available software Where it is changing is in the returns for businesses which has a plan to be be totally electronic submisssion in the future with requirements that establish an auditable trail. I reviewed what was available directly from their website about two months ago and it was mainly good intentions and no documentation. I went through it again todayand there have been a lot of additional documents added recently. They are still full of circular references at this stage however. Once businesses are completely digital I suspect pressure may come on for individual tax payers to also submit The problem I see for free software developers here is to register as a developer for the software, you have to be an existing business as you require a registration only available to an existing registered business. SDKs and APIs which appear to be written in C# are only available to the registered developers. The messaging protocols and data formats used are being developed by a collaboration of the Tax Office with some existing software developers which does give that group of current developers a considerable competitive advantage over new entries into the market. This effectively cuts developers of free software out of the loop unless they are able to register a business and makes it hard to get enough information to even create export files from GnuCash for import to commercially available software which can do the digital submission. This was what I initially set out to investigate. The upside of that is that the protocols being used are industry standard both for validation and messaging which uses XBRL,JSON and XML for the message formats. I haven't been able to establish whether the exchanged messages are encrypted or not at this stage but one would hope they would be to prevent interception of data streams to validated users. Business registration requires the issue of a key, but it is not clear in what I have waded through so far whether this is also used for encryption or only for user validation. The initial messages around the UK Making Tax Digital were equally confusing and appeared to be far more draconian than what has eventuated so far. Public scrutiny never goes astray. i think there is some value in comparing how our various governments do these things. Possibly little chance of influencing them directly but awareness at least of the differnet approaches used in other countries and jurisdictions helps . David ----- David Cousens -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
