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Admin
In Canada, this is not true. Store coupons work this way but manufacturer coupons work the opposite way.
If I, as the owner of Technolux IT, send out a flyer that has a "save $2 off a Tankeycore RAM module", that comes off BEFORE taxes are applied because I am selling the RAM to you for a less money (a $10 purchase with 10% tax would come out to $8.80). If the Unodexon corp. issues a manufactures coupon for $2 off their Unaron mouse pad, that comes off after taxes because I am still getting the same amount for the product, Unodexon will reimburse me the $2 (a $10 purchase with 10% tax would come out to $9).
Admin
David, and all the employees who knew their companies were doing this, but who didn't report anything to the authorities, or who helped implement this, are just as guilty as the CEO with his slushfund.
Admin
I think this is why weights and measures exists. If this is reported to them, they have to fix the error or they'd be fined. The money collected then, I want to say ends up going to the government in this case.
Admin
Tbat's why oit is a lot simpler to simply not pay tax. That way you can be sure you haven't overpaid...
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Microsoft would just call it compatibility mode.
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Admin
Oh, so you've pretty much arrived at the same point as Rene Descartes did 4 centuries ago...
Admin
My first project as a tester was a conversion from Cobol to C#. And the new program had to function EXACTLY like the previous one, bugs and all. It was bizarre.
The company also had a lot of assets it didn't know it had. At one point they'd found a printer somewhere. They disconnected it with a note hanging on it to call a number if anyone needed it. Weeks went by, and no-one called.
It was interesting to watch that process.
Admin
René postulated it the other way round.
Cogito ergo sum.
Of course, we never see this in its full context, which is unfortunate because it sheds a whole new light on a large part of Western philosphy. The full text (yes, he wrote in English) is:
"I think, therefore I am.
I think."
Admin
"I think not" said Descartes and dissappeared.
Admin
Somewhat paradoxically, Texas is perfectly legal in all but one of the 202 recognised or de facto sovereign states that are not the USA.
(The one exception is Transnistria, which outlawed Texas in 2003 after an exchange student from Lubbock was caught urinating on an ancient and sacred sculpture located in Vulcăneşti.)
Admin
But these 100x100yards in a national park elsewhere would also be nice.
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I'm glad someone else picked up on this. I develop POS systems and it is fundamentally wrong to calculate tax at total level.
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"Fundamentally wrong"? At what foundational level? Law of nature? Constitution of the nation in which you live? Or just according to the more-or-less arbitrary current business rules and taxation laws of the locale into which your application is to be implemented?
The only things in this universe which are "fundamentally wrong" are stepping on the cracks in the pavement (that's "sidewalk" in US English) and wearing a handkerchief in the breast pocket of your suit whose colour does not match your recreational orientation.
Admin
My sympathy's entirely with the customer. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Particularly like the careful roll out without breaking the backend. No wonder the company was doing well.
Sounds like David's team built a spec on assumptions. How did they fail to notice the discrepancies between their reporting and the original in testing? Or did they spot them but just think, "We're right!" and sign the bug off? I suspect David's company will be following it's predecessor into Chapter 11.
(Unless they tip of the tax office: project #2 right there! And the code's already written.)
Admin
Attention deficit showing itself there, Bob.
It wasn't the company for which David's company was doing the work that was in Chapter 11. It was the company that was supplying its cash registers.
What the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mob fail to appreciate is that if your business is dependent upon technology which is no longer maintainable, you gotta upgrade whether you want to or not.
I've worked on one of those jobs. Pro*Fortran had fallen off the bottom of the infrastructure and I had to rebuild the interface between our VAX Fortran programs and our Oracle database. No worries. Kept me in lucrative work for a happy and fun few months, and got me some pleasant intercontinental travel, so I'm not knocking that, no way.
The point is, sometimes aspects of your upgrade strategy are dictated to you by third parties. It's not all eager and naive young junior managers wanting to play with some flashy new toys.
Admin
Sunk Cost Fallacy! GNAAARRFG!!
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Easy, the government was the one who was using failing/"fixed" software or hardware. So they are innocent of the overcharging, even if they profit from it.
The only other possible ethical action (to return it to customers) can be so much of a nightmare for retail bussiness that they would happily give the state 2x just to not have to track every receipt.
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I prefer theses stories with their "soul crushing" endings as opposed to mild to good endings (like "The Might of the PEN"). Why? Because soul crushing endings make me feel better about my job.
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I could come to point earlyer, but not been born, did not help my cos.
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In your hasteur, you neglected to add pizzazz. For shame.
Admin
I worked for AMD in the late nineties. During the 286-386-486-Pentium/K5 days, they sold their processors as being "bug compatible" with Intel's offerings.
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The system is very simple. Crime shouldn't pay. And neither should mistakes because that will simply lead to crime. If Mr. C. gets what he claims the taxes are wrong and pockets the difference it benefits him. He has no incentive to correct the problem. Indeed he has the incentive to make this mistake every time. If Mr. G (or anyone else) gets the benefit of Mr. C's mistake there will be an incentive for Mr. C to fix it. And given the administrative overheads of trying to pay back every person individually, the Government is the logical person to keep the fine.
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But his society did go down the drain!
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Pardon me for being hyper-detail-oriented, but I've done the math the last couple years and noticed that all my receipts calculate tax on the total. I've never seen them calculate tax per line.
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If the manufacturer issues a $2 off customer, and reimburses that $2 to the store, then, depending on how the law is set up, sometimes someone does have to pay taxes on that $2...but it would be the manufacturer, not the customer. If it's like that, they're the one who paid the $2, they're the one who pays the tax on the $2.
I repeat what I said before: People do not pay transactional taxes on money they did not, in fact, use in their transaction. Taxes are on the actual transaction that actually exists, not a hypothetical transaction without discounts and coupons.
The law has no idea of what discounts and coupons exist, or how prices are manipulated before sale. They do not care if you add 30% markup and then knock off 30% of the price, they do not care you split the items in two and sold them 'buy one get one free'. They only care about how much cash passes from one person's hand to another persons's hand for specific sorts of goods and services in circumstances that are under the tax code.
Like I said, in some places, manufacturers reimbursing resellers for coupons might also count as a taxable transaction, I don't know, so it's possible there might be sales taxes in the backend. It probably depends on how the law is written. But if there are sales taxes back there, they are taxed back there. It is just fraudulent to tax the wrong people as it is to overtax people.
Admin
Do you think Aristotle was a Roman? Hellenistic Greek society remained relatively unchanged until they turned into Christians.
...Oh, nevermind...
Admin
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Up until the HST was introduced in Ontario, PST and GST worked in fundamentally different ways.
GST remitted to the government is the amount you collected in sales minus the amount you paid to all business suppliers (including office purchases, administration expenses, etc).
You don't pay PST on items you purchase for resale. You fill out a PST exemption form and your supplier doesn't collect the PST from you for items you are going to resell.
In your simplistic example, the government would get the same amount in both cases, but the real situation is a lot more complex because GST is paid at each level along the way but is credited back to all but the consumer, whereas no PST is paid on resellable goods - PST is only paid at the end of the chain.
Admin
I assume that the software company charged per line, rounding the tax up on every line.
I did work out for one product that was sold in a certain US airport that due to rounding errors it was most efficient to buy two (or maybe three; I forget) at a time.
Living somewhere where most prices are quoted including tax makes it much easier to work out what your final bill will be. (It always used to annoy me that I couldn't buy a $.99c item with a $1 bill because there would be $.05c tax to pay.)
Admin
I think the theory is that if, say, Al buys a house, and lives there for 30 years, and leaves it to his son Bob, and Bob lives there for 30 more years, that Charlie shouldn't be able to come along with a 100 year old deed or bill of sale, claim that he owns the land, and evict Bob. Even if it is true that Charlie's grandfather was cheated out of his rightful property, at some point we have to say that if you have in good faith believed that property belonged to you for X number of years, and no one else has challenged your claim, that the law will recognize you as the owner. Even if someone else can absolutely prove that he or his ancestor had a legal claim that was never legitimately given up. Without that, no one could ever be secure in their property rights. What if someone produces a 100 year old deed? 200 years old? 1000 years old? For almost any piece of property in the world, it is likely that if you went back far enough, you would find someone somewhere along the line who was cheated out of the land or had it stolen from him or abandoned it. Add to that all the possible legal technicalities: A sale might have been thought valid by everyone involved but there was some flaw in the paperwork or a tax was not paid or some such.
Can such laws be abused? Sure. A friend of a friend of mine was once involved in a court case where a neighbor had offerred to mow her lawn for her and do other sorts of maintenance. She was an elderly lady who had difficulty doing these things herself and gratefully accepted what she thought was a generous, helpful offer. He kept this up for I think it was seven years. Then he claimed that as he had been maintaining the land all these years, she had abandoned her property rights and he had acquired title under this legal principle! Maybe there was more to the story, I heard this all anecdotally, but I'm sure that there are patient scuzzballs out there who would use a legal trick like this to steal someone's property.
Admin
There are situations where tracking taxes at the line item is better. Consider hotel payment systems. It is very common for a business traveler to pay for their porno and minibar with a personal credit card, and pay for the rest of the transaction with their corporate card. If the hotel system wants to send an e-receipt along with the payment data, they need to be able to know which card was used to pay for which line item. Is there a city tax that applies to the liquor, movie, and lodging equally? If so then if you make it only one line item, you don't have the information you need to send an e-receipt because of the split folio. While if you calculate tax on each line item, then you can tie each line item to a paying card, and create split folio e-receipts. I admit, a somewhat obscure case (that happens to be what I deal with everyday), but the same logic would apply anytime you can pay with more than one form of payment.
Admin
Silly rabbit, Richard Pryor had all this figured out in the Superman movie.
Admin
And by extension, you, who's arguing with a troll script, must also be a script, and hence, can't think.
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So whats that make you? This could go on forever. Hurr. Durr.
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And by extension, you, who's arguing with a troll script, must also be a script, and hence, can't think.
Admin
People seem to be focusing on that, but I have no comment on the best way to keep track of overall taxes. I was just pointing out that, generally, a running total was enough, unless you were sold things at different taxes rates, and even then multiple running totals might be easier.
What I was taking issue with the idiotic 'round the tax on each line items down' claim, which people cannot, in fact, do. (Because then retailers could just infinitely subdivide each transaction and pay no tax.) That was all I was taking issue with.
If I hand over $3.10 for items taxed at 10%, I have to pay 31 cents tax, period. I can't claim I bought 5 items at 61 cents, and paid 6 cents tax on each, so only owe 30 cents tax. I can't claim to have bought 155 items at 2 cents each, each rounded down to no tax, and owe them no money at all.
The tax people do not care how the transaction was divided up. $3.10 changed hand, the tax rate on the stuff it changed hands for was 10%, I owe them 31 damn cents in tax. (How much I would owe if the rate was 11% and calculation came out to owing them 34.1 cents is another matter. Some places that makes 35, some 34. But even if you can round down, you can only do it at the end.)
In this example, they appeared to be rounding up on each item, which you probably can do...but you can't collect money from customers by claiming it is sales tax and then keep that money. If you collect it as sales tax, you have to turn it in as such.
And, speaking of hotels, you probably know this better than me, but I suspect what hotel systems does is not actually 'keep track' of any taxes. If someone wishes to make a payment on a certain set of items, the hotel just calculate the tax on those items during payment.
No one needed to 'keep track' of anything, anymore than the stores need to 'keep track' of different taxes if someone comes up and makes two separate transactions. When each payment happens, it is taxed.
Admin
And you are talking from experience? Have you developed a POS system? Have you researched the laws? Have you talked to your local tax-office?
You're merely talking from logic, a concept that isn't always applied to the real world.
No, you're, of course, not allowed to split one item into fifty sub-items to avoid tax. But you are allowed to tax each item separately and round down. We are talking a few pennies here on receipts with several dozen low-priced items. Ten percent on 3.10 is really easy, but 12% on 0.33 is a bit more complicated. Tax would be 0.0396 dollars. What do you do? Overcharge tax (round up to 0.04)? You would charge a tax that is HIGHER than legal. What to do?
Admin
http://www.state.nj.us/treasury/taxation/pdf/pubs/sales/anj9.pdf
The reason for this is that when I, the consumer, hand the store my $2 manufacturer coupon, that is me handing them payment for the product, hence I am taxed on it.
The same would apply if I paid for my TV from BestBuy by giving them 7 donkeys. It is still payment and tax is still due on the value of that TV.
For store/seller coupons the value of the product is reduced thus tax isn't paid. For manufacturer coupons the payment is simply accepted in another form.
The government doesn't care how much Cash (or Credit) I give the store. They care what value the store attached to the item they sold me.
Admin
Also, the only real WTF I see here is the company refusing to update the look/feel of the system.
A phased rollout is a minor WTF, but understandable from a business standpoint.
However, given a phased rollout the new software has to function and calculate exactly like the old one. It doesn't matter if the old system did it wrong you can't have half a store saying $100 in sales and $10 in tax and the other half saying $99.99 in sales and $10.01 in tax.
I also don't agree with calling taxation by line and no support for coupons "bugs" The software was functioning exactly as designed. The design simply didn't line up with local tax laws.
If you ask me to design a calculator that says 1+1=3 and then type in 1+1 and get 3, that's not a bug, that's a fault in the specification.
Perhaps it's just semantics, but bugs always seems to imply the fault of the individuals/corporations who actually did the implementation/coding rather than the ones who created the spec.
Admin
Also I'm not arguing with the troll script. I have no expectation that it can recognize its limits or the flaws in its reasoning, so that's not a proper argument.
Admin
The customer specifies what the application should do. The vendor should make sure that the customer understands these specifications. The vendor can refuse to take the job. But the vendor does not define what the correct functioning of the program is.
Admin
Well, duh. That wasn't a bug; that was a feature.
Addendum (2011-05-14 08:51): More seriously, if these bugs skimmed both from the customers and from the sales tax, then specifically asking for them to be implemented is a great way to get the IRS and/or FBI interested.
Admin
Corect
Person who pay money get to say what he want. If you walk in barber shop and tell him "Barber, I want you to shave half of my head." Then Barber tell him "No, you must get full head shaved", the person will go to another barber. So first barber will lose money.
To stay in business he must agree to shave half his head. That is busines sense.
Admin
This analogy is not perfect because being half bald is not a crime, while tax evasion and defrauding customers are.
Admin