Now I come to think of it, accountancy could learn a bit from IT. OK IT is about 100 years old and accountancy has been running for millenia and double entry and the three ledgers are quite well understood. Avoiding tax seems to occupy the minds of far too many people. Instead of fixating on a 20% "loss" to tax, why not try to increase production/sales by say 30%. Cost your time on each endeavour and see which makes the best return.
I think accountancy needs something like the CVE system too. So when a new tax avoidance measure is discovered - CVE number deployed, description, patches by vendor/govt. etc etc. In the UK, when you do your Self Assessment tax thing, you could simply declare which CVEs you accidentally used for a 50% discount this year but full payment next year and those not declared run 200% if found out.
Eh, cloud accounting started taking off back in 2013 or so. The accounting industry is making changing. In the UK, you have small changes like making tax digital with the HRMC. A lot of those CVEs appear to be intentional to incentivize certain behaviors or outcomes or to give your political friends more money. Tax professionals these days work with both domain knowledge and specialized software and don't need encyclopedic knowledge of the tax code anymore. So yes, when the tax law changes, the software gets patched as well.
Double entry accounting more or less started with Luca Pacioli in the 15th century. Our current CPA/CA/CMA environment started in the early 20th century. A lot of entry level work and rote data entry is being handled more programs these days, but a lot of the core work may remain out of reach of automation due to the edge cases or frequent changes. More firm consolidation is happening, and more non-accounting majors are being hired to work in accounting businesses.
> Instead of fixating on a 20% "loss" to tax, why not try to increase production/sales by say 30%. Cost your time on each endeavour and see which makes the best return.
A lot of the mindset is minimizing one of the biggest expenses, taxes, in order to maximize leftover money. Not every industry can scale up quite so easily as software :). So, if sales can be increased substantially, minimizing costs, or taxes, would be one of the natural areas of focus. Americans, including me, are often quite jealous of the ease of tax filing in other countries.
Anyways, cheers.
I think accountancy needs something like the CVE system too. So when a new tax avoidance measure is discovered - CVE number deployed, description, patches by vendor/govt. etc etc. In the UK, when you do your Self Assessment tax thing, you could simply declare which CVEs you accidentally used for a 50% discount this year but full payment next year and those not declared run 200% if found out.