Re: a bit OT- Fully Open Standards for Citizen-Government

On Fri, 15 Apr 2005, Forrest J. Cavalier III wrote:

> The effort for the government to design the procedure
> to accept things a different way is non-trivial.  The need to
> train IRS examiners to deal with the different formats is not
> trivial either.
>
> As it is, the IRS uses automatic document processing and IIRC
> some OCR handwriting recognition.  It works well-enough.

Actually, a little googling shows that the IRS does have a pretty massive 
effort towards XML-based tax reporting and some of it is already 
available. There is even an OASIS group formed for XML taxes: 
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=tax

(Not that any of it is going to eliminate the need for TurboTax because 
the complexity is in the ever changing tax code, not the actual submittion 
method).

Grisha