[openspending-dev] Different parameters for taxman

Wed Jul 31 21:14:09 UTC 2013

Hi all,

Yoshihide Jimbo contributed a really good addition to taxman (the tax
calculations for Japan which included a reusable test framework for all
jurisdictions and grunt processes).

https://github.com/openspending/taxman/pull/4

This is a great addition and I reviewed it. I noticed that this
implementation uses different input parameters than the other
implementations (annual_salary instead of income) and pointed it out to
Yoshihide Jimbo. We have discussed this a bit in the comments but it's
hard to reach a conclusion.

With this we would move away from the stated goal of keeping things
consistent (as the README says):

"That said, it is hoped that as we add more jurisdictions we will work
out which parts of the API we can standardise. *Consistency* across
jurisdictions is very important if TaxMan is to be useful, and at the
moment we are relying entirely on contributors' discipline to ensure it."

Yoshihide pointed out in our discussions that income isn't a good
parameter to use because there might be different types of income.

I therefore wanted to raise this disucssion here on the dev mailing list
to get input from you all. So what do you think? Please also look at the
discussions in the comments for the pull request:

https://github.com/openspending/taxman/pull/4

-- 

Tryggvi Björgvinsson

Technical Lead, OpenSpending

The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org>

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