February 22, 2021 — At this stage there are more questions than answers.
Another way to ask this question—what are all the forms that the IRS accepts from citizens that the citizen has to fill out?
These forms can be thought of as the "compile targets". CopyPasteTaxes will be a Tree Language that "compiles" (aka generates) these final forms.
These forms may be PDF. Or maybe XML. Or JSON. Or something else. I'm not sure what the IRS accepts. This is something to figure out.
It will be good to see how many types of forms there are, who files what, and how many are filed each year (and trends).
These would be things like W2's and 1099's. How many of these types of forms are there?
How many does the average citizen send in each year?
My guess is these forms we just need to understand in terms of what fields we'd need to extract for the language for copying into the compile targets.
Who has made some great checklists on every workflow that can happen with the IRS?
This one will probably be a real snoozer. What are the all calcuations necessary to help figure out the right numbers to put in the compile targets?
Should CopyPasteTaxes only do personal taxes? What about for self-employed people? It may be hard to only do personal, as that might exclude self-employed people, who may be the ones who most need CopyPasteTaxes.
Federal is first, but then how can we make it so we compile to other state level targets as well?
Should CopyPasteTaxes help with itemized expenses? What would that entail? Would a sub DSL for receipts make sense?
Everyone knows April 15th. What are the other dates to have on the calendar?