That time of the year, when invariably this frustration arises in many FOSS users' minds and invariably such discussion threads come up in various mailing lists and die down.
Nobody knows how to change the system, or how to even wake it up to what horrendous choice they have made by forcing to buy proprietary software. They simply claim online return filing is "free". Once in a while representations are made by FOSS enthusiasts' groups to the Govt, some talk of PIL comes up and dies down. Some enthusiasts have ported the forms to OpenOffice, but they have done that only for one odd form for one odd year's version. Commendable effort though not sufficient for all. To complicate life, the forms do undergo minor revisions every year, and even during a given return filing season. It's likely to undergo a major revision whenever a new tax code comes into force. Some (rather many) simply subscribe to paid online or offline services for this purpose. The pain (I find) with this is, you still are responsible for what they file and end up spending a good amount of time ensuring the correctness and find annoying defects at times with what your vendor has prepared as your IT return. You end up paying them for educating them at times. This year I'm starting this thread after the "return filing season" has subsided, so that at least next year we can save the humiliation for ourselves. No, this time not suggesting PIL, representation to Govt and all. Let's try to deal with it technically. What would it take to create the "xml" that one has to finally upload be prepared by hand? Its schema is available. What needs to be extracted from their Excel is some auto-computed fields' rules and some validation rules. Is it possible to reliably extract the macros from Excel forms and mimic them into an offline utility? Has anyone tried anything like that. (Salute to you if you have.) Any ideas on this are welcome. Mayuresh. my openion is:- the solution to this problem is to file a writ petition in the public interest not only for IT returns but for all the govt. documents. court should make it compulsary foss compatibility , for all govt. sites. for that matter, if any of us is an advocate or any active advocate on the side of foss, should come forward and we will support him. jayant _______________________________________ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List
