I thought it was just an overdramatic way of saying that it’s difficult to change the tax rate, but:
But a compromise has surfaced: the government is now floating the idea of reducing the tax on food to 1%, which could be done in five or six months.
How could you possibly build something this stupid? Maybe we’ll just store the tax rate, as a percentage, minus 1, in 4 bits.
I guess realistically it’s probably something about creating multiple transactions and having one of them be invalid, but wouldn’t that also break when the tax gets rounded to zero?
There were concerns that if the tax rate is zero they have to check everywhere that nothing is ever divided by the tax rate or the computed tax. If it’s 1% they just have to change the number everywhere. And then I guess a significant part of the “months” that takes is also just testing, certifications, etc.
How could you possibly build something this stupid?
Out gereric VAT rate changed to 25,5% about a year go. It’s been a whole number since current implementation was introduced in 1994. There was quite a few big systems running on accounting, cash registers, payment processors and whatever which couldn’t store decimals on VAT value. And obviously all the official information never stated that VAT couldn’t have decimals at some point, it just never had them before and thus vendors have just stored it as an plain integer and quite a lot of systems needed upgrade or on some cases full replacement.
So, apparently it’s pretty easy to build something that stupid.
I thought it was just an overdramatic way of saying that it’s difficult to change the tax rate, but:
How could you possibly build something this stupid? Maybe we’ll just store the tax rate, as a percentage, minus 1, in 4 bits.
I guess realistically it’s probably something about creating multiple transactions and having one of them be invalid, but wouldn’t that also break when the tax gets rounded to zero?
There were concerns that if the tax rate is zero they have to check everywhere that nothing is ever divided by the tax rate or the computed tax. If it’s 1% they just have to change the number everywhere. And then I guess a significant part of the “months” that takes is also just testing, certifications, etc.
Out gereric VAT rate changed to 25,5% about a year go. It’s been a whole number since current implementation was introduced in 1994. There was quite a few big systems running on accounting, cash registers, payment processors and whatever which couldn’t store decimals on VAT value. And obviously all the official information never stated that VAT couldn’t have decimals at some point, it just never had them before and thus vendors have just stored it as an plain integer and quite a lot of systems needed upgrade or on some cases full replacement.
So, apparently it’s pretty easy to build something that stupid.
That I at least sort of understand, but 1 being easier to support than 0? Neighbour comment might be onto something with the division thing.