I thought it was just an overdramatic way of saying that it’s difficult to change the tax rate, but:
But a compromise has surfaced: the government is now floating the idea of reducing the tax on food to 1%, which could be done in five or six months.
How could you possibly build something this stupid? Maybe we’ll just store the tax rate, as a percentage, minus 1, in 4 bits.
I guess realistically it’s probably something about creating multiple transactions and having one of them be invalid, but wouldn’t that also break when the tax gets rounded to zero?
setsubyou@lemmy.world
on 28 May 05:02
nextcollapse
There were concerns that if the tax rate is zero they have to check everywhere that nothing is ever divided by the tax rate or the computed tax. If it’s 1% they just have to change the number everywhere. And then I guess a significant part of the “months” that takes is also just testing, certifications, etc.
How could you possibly build something this stupid?
Out gereric VAT rate changed to 25,5% about a year go. It’s been a whole number since current implementation was introduced in 1994. There was quite a few big systems running on accounting, cash registers, payment processors and whatever which couldn’t store decimals on VAT value. And obviously all the official information never stated that VAT couldn’t have decimals at some point, it just never had them before and thus vendors have just stored it as an plain integer and quite a lot of systems needed upgrade or on some cases full replacement.
So, apparently it’s pretty easy to build something that stupid.
I don’t see the problem. Drop the tax and if the companies can’t handle it, they continue to pay it. And once it costs them money they will fix it in 1 week instead of a year.
Unfortunately the tax is added at the register and paid by the consumer, so if they just do nothing the companies end up with extra money that they can then just not pass on to the government relatively easily, while consumers still see a tax on their receipts that should not exist.
threaded - newest
yeah I totally want to, guys, it’s these damn cash registers to blame!
Be nice. These people are still using fax machines and floppy disks.
I thought it was just an overdramatic way of saying that it’s difficult to change the tax rate, but:
How could you possibly build something this stupid? Maybe we’ll just store the tax rate, as a percentage, minus 1, in 4 bits.
I guess realistically it’s probably something about creating multiple transactions and having one of them be invalid, but wouldn’t that also break when the tax gets rounded to zero?
There were concerns that if the tax rate is zero they have to check everywhere that nothing is ever divided by the tax rate or the computed tax. If it’s 1% they just have to change the number everywhere. And then I guess a significant part of the “months” that takes is also just testing, certifications, etc.
Out gereric VAT rate changed to 25,5% about a year go. It’s been a whole number since current implementation was introduced in 1994. There was quite a few big systems running on accounting, cash registers, payment processors and whatever which couldn’t store decimals on VAT value. And obviously all the official information never stated that VAT couldn’t have decimals at some point, it just never had them before and thus vendors have just stored it as an plain integer and quite a lot of systems needed upgrade or on some cases full replacement.
So, apparently it’s pretty easy to build something that stupid.
I don’t see the problem. Drop the tax and if the companies can’t handle it, they continue to pay it. And once it costs them money they will fix it in 1 week instead of a year.
Unfortunately the tax is added at the register and paid by the consumer, so if they just do nothing the companies end up with extra money that they can then just not pass on to the government relatively easily, while consumers still see a tax on their receipts that should not exist.
But it’s in the interest of each business to charge as little as possible while maintaining profit.
So if a competitor of yours is able to not charge tax then you’d better get your act in gear to remain competitive.
There’s also an incentive to be the first to offer the tax free sales so it should sort itself out over time.
We had something stupid like they when tax rate was set to I think 7.5% instead of 7% and they discovered most tax software couldn’t handle decimals.