TAG | Linux and the tax office: never the twain shall meet |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 16 May 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 3 Australian citizens who use GNU/Linux in their businesses should be asking exactly that question of their tax authority. (However, I doubt that anyone will do so - apart from one person who has been asking the question for at least three years). It's a tale that runs over nearly three years. Australian businesses have to periodically submit activity statements to the Australian Taxation Office and most businesses use the online method. The tax office provides a client for its electronic commerce interface (ECI) which allows businesses to file activity statements over the internet. Clients exist only for Windows and the Apple Macintosh. In November 2005, Andrew Greig, a community distributor for OpenOffice.org, and owner of a small business, who had been carrying on a conversation with the tax office about an ECI client for Linux for some time, posted a message to the Linux Users of Victoria mailing list, informing members that a trial ECI client had been made available for download. He provided a link to the download. There was a flurry of downloads and many of those who obtained the software were ecstatic about the fact that it actually did the job. A little bit of mucking about was involved but Linux users being what they are, things were soon working and working well. But soon after that the link went dead . The official version of events was that the software download was a limited trial for a small number of users; the tax office would evaluate the results of the trial and decide whether it would release the client for general download. There was no word at the time as to how long the evaluation would take. |
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