a bit OT- Fully Open Standards for Citizen-Government

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Interfacing.

On CSPAN yesterday, I half-listened while commuting, to a presentation
having to do with tax collection and management in the United States.
Presenting was a fellow from Intuit. I felt his presentation was quite
good, clueful within it's rather narrow scope and informative.

He gave a stat, that for tax year 2004 (I think) over 50 percent
of individuals filed their taxes "electronically". As I don't use
Tax software, I don't completely understand what this means.

However, he whenged a bit concerning "freeware" (as in beer) lowering
the bar for the bread-and-butter software his company sells,
forcing his company to enter the "freeware" with a product that
will undercut their own corporate health in order to maintain
a market share.

I felt his points were valid to a degree. I am not a big fan
of "freeware" (as in beer) which I also call shovel-ware.
(seems folks load new computers with all this free garbage,
requiring a full rebuild upon delivery. Value added). And
so much of this stuff is just a delivery vehicle for banner
ads, and other commercial tie-ins. But all of this is beside
the point.

Surely, some one is out there, pushing for a Open Standard for
"documents" with which the citizenry interfaces with it's government.

In this one particular case, it seems to me, the great unwashed,
that a simple human-readable, machine parseable flat text
file, cryptographically signed (or encrypted) is all that is needed.
A person, such as myself, could do their taxes on paper with a pencil
as they have for over 30 years, input the data into a script,
and output a file, that could be delivered as a tax filing return.
Intuit would sell a software that does this "automatically" and that's
fine. But I would hope, that I would be able to help in the social
contract with my government to lower their work by submitting
data that they can digest more easily WITHOUT having to use any
proprietary software, unless that is my choice.

Is anyone on this list aware of group that is lobbying in this
direction? Doing some work like this? If so, could they please
share that information? I should like to assist in whatever small
way I can.

I think the implications of this is intuit-ivly obvious. (sorry)

Thanks kindly in advance,

- --chipper

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