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The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system updateThe exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system updatePosted Jan 13, 2009 22:15 UTC (Tue) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942)Parent article: The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system update
> The printing of tax forms is just not a task which inspires hackers
Once in 1998 I was involved in a web project where one of the requirements was printing of some forms from a browser. The solution was to generate PDF using server-side JavaScript. Since the resulting PDFs must be small for quick downloads over slow modems, it was not possible to use scanned images of the original forms.
So we ended up using a ruler and magnifying glass to measure all the lines and fonts to reconstruct the forms more-or-less precisely using PDF's vector graphics and default fonts. That was rather challenging!
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The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system update Posted Jan 13, 2009 22:35 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
by the way, the IRS has a few different formats of forms that they accept. back in the days of dot-matrix and daisy-wheel printers it was already possible to print forms acceptable to the IRS.
they don't have to be identical to the paper forms (especially in terms of shading, boxes to fill in, etc) they need to be in the right order with the data clearly displayed.
finding out exactly what is acceptable requires talking to the IRS (with the corresponding communications effort), while duplicating the paper forms can be done by anyone (with considerably more technical effort to duplicate things that probably aren't significant anyway)
The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system update Posted Jan 13, 2009 23:49 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
1099s are a bit more challenging than things like 1040s because you have to give the 1099 to the people you paid, and they have to be able to fill in their 1040 based on it. The dot-matrix form is fine for the IRS, but individual taxpayers will be somewhat less happy with it; I've gotten a 1040 in that format, and it's kind of like reading a CSV file, except without any headings, and without the commas. I was able to photocopy it and mail it to the IRS, but I wouldn't have been able to fill out other forms with information from it.
On the other hand, the IRS doesn't even get the 1099s in general, and they've only got a few numbers, so you could probably make a sufficient 1099 in HTML without any particular difficulty.
The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system update Posted Jan 15, 2009 18:48 UTC (Thu) by kingdon (subscriber, #4526) [Link]
My last first-hand experience as a payer was in 1999 or so, but from a quick web search the following doesn't appear to have changed. (1) the payer does file a copy of every 1099 with the IRS (the US tax agency), and (2) they need to be on special machine-readable paper, the background of which is printed in red ink. If you just have a few, go to an office supply store, buy said red forms, and fill them out with a pen. If you have more, well, this is why all this discussion of software and so on.
1099 Posted Jan 23, 2009 23:29 UTC (Fri) by dfsmith (guest, #20302) [Link] The IRS will mail 1099 forms to you for free if you order them on their web site. Surprisingly, they're quite efficient. You will need an impact printer or well-limbered hand to fill them out though! (We send out fewer than 20 a year.) I also reviewed the open-source and proprietary accounting programs. I settled on Quickbooks 95 (yes, 1995!) because...
The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system update Posted Jan 14, 2009 15:29 UTC (Wed) by pzb (guest, #656) [Link]
I've had the same experience. We had someone who had the full time job of taking paper forms and using a ruler to convert them to electronic format. Given, this was ten years ago, and things have gotten better, but even so, the IRS, 50 states, plus local forms means hundreds of changes per year.
The exceedingly grumpy editor's accounting system update Posted Jan 15, 2009 2:54 UTC (Thu) by Tara_Li (subscriber, #26706) [Link]
This problem actually surprises me - the IRS provides all of its forms in PDF (most of them fillable-in...) I'm not sure what would be involved in parsing and letting the accounting system fill them in, but shouldn't be too bad if PDF is still as open as its supposed to be.
I think a lot of the forms are provided in SGML or XML, too.
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