taxcodesoftware-dev1040 — 1040 Working Group

[Marcel Q. <mar...@ea...>]

Thanks for the update, Richard. I'll have a look at it during the
weekend.
 
</MQ>

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Braman [mailto:rb...@br...] 
Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2006 11:32 AM
To: tax...@li...
Cc: mar...@ea...
Subject: FW: Open Source Search


Hello,
 
Here's some news.
 
The prototype of 1040EZ on Xforms is coming along, this is alpha
remember.
http://24.75.221.234:8080/taxcode/1040ez
 
When to launch it, it will take IE a moment to download the calcuation
engine and forms, but once its downloaded 
you will see that calculations happen immediately as you change the
values.
 
To goto w-2, click "View" next to line 1, 
 
You will notice some examples of help that can be applied, indicate by
the couple ? boxes .
All of this code is in one xforms + xhtml file, there was no scripting
to be done by me.  the calcs are done using XPath 2.0 another w3c
standard language for accesing data in XML documents. Attached are the
files used.  Take a minute to look at them and you can see how the
application works.
 
The code is runing on Orbeon Presentation Server 3.01.  Evalulation has
started for compatability with other XForms Engines.
 
f1040ez.xml, taxtabletable.xml, eictable,xml, and fw2.xml are XForms
Instance data, which are generated automatically from the IRS efile
specs in pub 1346. 
www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1346.pdf
The instance contains default values, and this format is easily
converted to the IRS e-file format, because it is already just xn XML
representation of  it and all you really need is a simple XSL stylesheet
to do it, which is on the short todo list.  I have initialized the
instance with the taxpayers data from PATS test scenario 1.  Normally
users will upload their data from a file, or retrive a stroed version
from a networked database
 
f1040ez.xsl is the xhtml+xforms doc which has all of the calculatons,
form controls, data binding, etc.
Form controls are layed out using xhtml for absolute positioning.
 
f1040ez was generated automatically from IRS pdfs, without the
calcations of course.  
 
It is important to note that many calculations are defined in Pub 1346
as the efile errors, but those must be parsed into xpath calcs.  I have
started developing technology to do just that,   automoting that
process, and giving the forms a base set of calculations.
 
There are images of each pdf used for the former background, I only sent
f1040ez-1.png in this package.
 
Things to do for 1040EZ:
 
Finish EIC worksheets (should be done today)
Fix calc bug with 1040EZ page 2 standard deduction, calc works right but
not recalculating to page 1 correctly.
Format instance as e-file.
open file/upload, save, download capability.
convert to PDF.
Design an open source WYSIWYG editor.
 
These things should be done within the next week or two.
 
 

FYI,  I am working on a opens source tax search project (called
taxonomy) for tax using search engine developed by www.nutch.org
<http://www.nutch.org/>  .  Nutch is really cool technology.  I am
crawling all fed and state government tax sites now.  I will send you a
link when it is done.  This technology has other implications for tax
software development (for instance keeping an up-to-date index of
irs/state pdfs and parsing them into Xforms as they get published, even
publishing them into tax code compliant Xforms on the fly) , along with
being a very good tool for tax research, which is necessary for free tax
software.  
 
A preview of the taxonomy/nutch ui can be found here, though it returns
no results until the initial crawl is done. 
http://24.75.221.234:8080
 

Richard Braman
mailto:rb...@ta...
561.748.4002 (voice) 

http://www.taxcodesoftware.org <http://www.taxcodesoftware.org/> 
Free Open Source Tax Software