Free/Libre Canadian Tax Preparation Software Project Base design discussion

Tax Calculation Rules

may come from multiple sources. Successfully parsing the logic in the E-text forms would capture much of the tax logic, but not all. e.g. The T1 form has nothing on it to indicate that capital losses can be negative on the final return. It will be essential for different people to contribute calculations for different provinces, and different parts of the federal calculations. There needs to be to a way to manage and merge tax rules, something like GIT or a Linux Package Management system for the tax rules.
there has to be some way of presenting the tax calculations in a format that matches the paper forms so the user can validate the calculations. That means carrying information about the context of the calculation such as what form does it appear on, what text is around it, etc.
- one approach would be to use an extended version of the E-text forms that extends the vocabulary to cover things like the final return
- another approach would be to have a field dictionary that identifies the context where the field occurs. Something like this will probably be needed to netfile anyway

GUI

should be optional
should be modular: it should be possible to have separate GUIs to input tax forms, view tax forms, where GUI doesn't exist it should be possible to fall back to a text editor or the command line
design should decided whether to include automatic recalculation to support a more interactive GUI

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