What would it take to develop a piece of Open Source software that makes it easy for accountants/tax attorneys to build TurboTax form equivalents? Basically a CMS for tax forms to be translated into plain english, and then the inputs to be put back into the correct places on the forms.
A bigger question is: What does it take to update it constantly? The problem is that US Tax law is incredibly complicated and changes in impactful ways nearly annually (last tax year and next tax year in particular will require tons of updates, due to COVID-bill related programs).
I think Open Source works well when the underlying work is fun and the software is somewhat timeless to minimize ongoing workload. Tax software by its very nature is none of those things.
Honestly I think OSS is great but this is more fitting for the IRS to do itself rather than hoping that a bunch of lawyers/tax professionals/financial programmers suddenly decide they want to spend their evenings writing the most boring software imaginable.
That’s why I suggested building the infrastructure for the tax tool (CMS) to make it easy and fast to build the questionnaire for the forms. Since the forms are going to change, what we need is to make it so that it takes very little time to build a TurboTax competitor each year.
There is no way I am going to get a bunch of accountants and tax lawyers to write a ton of code each year for free, but ask them to build a plain English questionnaire for a form as easily as you would create a survey in SurveyMonkey? Maybe.
