Naga

In Canada, it is a requirement to self-assess GST on purchases you make online. When you buy something online, you're supposed to fill out a form and mail a cheque to the government for the GST you should have paid on it. That being said, this is completely unenforced as well as unenforceable. Also, if you ask basically anyone in Canada they probably would have no idea this was a rule, but the rules are the rules.

https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publi...

Yeah, you're right, my coffee hasn't kicked in yet.

For the amount I thought you would pay for Stripe to do that, you could have hired an accountant to figure all of that out for you on an ongoing basis, but for the actual price that's a pretty good deal to not have to think about it.

My opinion on accounting services has always been that it's nothing that a business owner can't do themselves since it's not really that complicated, but it's never worth the time when you can pay someone who already knows what they're doing. Stripe Tax falls into that category for me too, it's cheap enough that it makes it not worth it to do it yourself.

That looks great, but that's a ridiculous pricing scheme. If you invoice $100k in a year, you're paying $4000 to Stripe to manage your sales tax.

A lot of the issues with sales tax are not knowing your regulatory requirements and set up. I'd say that's probably worth $4k, but then going forward you still have to pay them that amount. I'd say it would be more worthwhile to pay an accountant to do that for you, and save the ongoing fee. You will have to pay an accountant anyways to do your tax returns. I'm an accountant and my firm often does sales tax returns for our clients. Now, if you're making $1 million a year, that's $40k you need to pay Stripe for the privilege of not worrying about sales tax, compared to a few thousand you'll pay your accounting firm to do it.

The API and integration options are great and I hope Stripe is successful. Really, if they are, it means I can just charge more for my services.

Edit: As others have pointed out, I'm bad at math. I'm going to leave my shame up here but I realize it's $400, not $4000. Just goes to show you that accountants are just like regular people, and that you shouldn't rely on your accountant doing things off the top of their head not using Excel. The order of magnitude difference really shifts my opinion of it.

I agree that this is hard and that there are no global tax authorities, I wasn't trying to say that's something that can just be implemented. It's probably the most realistic solution to the transfer pricing problem though, which probably says something about the scale of this issue.

I also disagree that the developing world is that much of a problem. Currently, in the developing world, money flows to places like the U.S. Virgin Islands, Bermuda, etc. While I'm sure they are not the only places that could act like as tax havens, there's probably a limit. Multinationals probably aren't going to want to relocate their headquarters to a developing country like Egypt for a variety of reasons like language, currency, corruption, weaker property laws, ease of moving cash, etc. Tax havens could also be disabled with tools like sanctions on a G7 or G20 basis. Bermuda doesn't want to play ball? Sure, then the G20 banks and governments will not allow their citizens to deal with Bermuda.

As other people have said, the goal isn't to prevent this from happening, it's to make it too risky or expensive to justify as opposed to just paying corporate tax on profits without shifting them.

It's complicated. "Money they made in their country" is hard to define. Large companies abuse intangible assets to shift profits around, but it's hard to say at what point abuse starts. For example, Google USA sells advertising to its clients. But, the assets it is selling are actually owned by Google Ireland. Google Ireland charges Google USA a license fee of 100% of the revenue they made. Suddenly, Google USA has net profit of 0 and Google Ireland has a large net profit.

This at the same time happens frequently, but also some amount of intercompany shifts in profit are reasonable. Google Ireland might be the actual owner of the asset. Company ownership might be fuzzy as well - maybe foreign subsidiary is only partially owned by the parent and partially owned by another company. Drawing the line can be very hard. Do we make it so companies are not allowed to sell or transfer assets overseas?

Probably the best solution is a minimum tax worldwide. This reduces the incentives to shift profits around, since the tax rates are the same everywhere.

SEEKING WORK | Ottawa, Ontario | REMOTE

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasbsavage/

I am a CPA with a day job in external audit. I'm looking for either advisory or consulting work either in accounting, bookkeeping or finance. I know that the accounting side of startups usually falls by the wayside as the product feels more important, so I'm here to help. I could also be a good resource if you have any particular financial reporting or tax questions that may require research. I am code as a hobby and am working on my own finance software so I have some expertise in coding too. If you need a bookkeeper for instance, or have specific requirements with generating reports out of your accounting software, I have expertise in that area as well.

If you're interested in someone with skills that intersect between finance and programming, please contact me at nick at nicksavage.ca.

I've been making my way through RAMQ's system. I actually think its deliberate to keep people from signing up. I'm a new resident of Quebec (within the last few years) and I had to prove I moved to Quebec when I first registered with RAMQ, then prove a efw years after that I still lived in Quebec. Their bar for residency is super high too - leases, property tax and utilities do not count (although they're good enough for me to pay taxes and vote here). They asked me to send bank and credit card statements to show that I'm actually making purchases in Quebec. This is an issue for me as I work and shop in Ontario as I live on the border. Apparently it's a requirement of the Canada Health Act to only buy groceries in the province you reside in.

This is an article from Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, a Canadian channel. While I understand the issue with context, they're writing to their audience of 1) Canadians who probably already know about residential schools as its in the news frequently and taught in schools and 2) aboriginals who most certain know about the horrors inflicted by the government of their people, many of which are still alive today.

Off the top of my head, I believe it was due to research done during the SARS epidemic in the early 2000s that trailed off as funding dried up when it was no longer an immediate threat.

Great question. I am not too familiar with Constantinople's waterworks (I've been reading mostly about Rome itself). Off the top of my head, could be related to exactly where the aqueducts were built or placed. Parts may or may not be easily accessible, or underground in areas. Besiegers would also have to know they are there, since it wasn't as easy to google as it is now a days.

Quick search though shows that it had been cut during at least one siege: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Constantinople_(626). The key is that you don't have to destroy the entire structure during a siege too, you just have to break ti enough that water doesn't flow through anymore.

> Aqueducts were not a Roman invention, but in Roman hands, these long-distance aqueducts were developed further and extensively diffused throughout one of the largest empires in history

Roman water management is one of my interests (ask my wife, she will tell you that it's annoying how much I talk about aqueducts). The real invention though wasn't the aqueduct, although they definitely are engineering feats, since they require reasonably precise measurements and construction over long distances. The real innovation though was being able to maintain (relative) peace over their territory. Aqueducts are large and imposing, but also fragile and impossible to defend. Defending Rome's aqueducts required keeping the enemy out of Italy, for example. Rome's real success was over that part, not necessarily just the construction.

There's actually a new maintainer as of this morning, but I think there's a lot of work to do so new contributions are always welcome!

https://orgmode.org/list/20210506135804.GE3@krupal/

Location: Ottawa, Ontario

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Currently knowledgeable about Python (including Flask, pyside, and pandas stuff) and emacs lisp. Willing to learn anything though.

CV: Have two things I can offer, first as a programmer and second as an accountant (I am a CPA with years of public accounting experience).

1) I currently no formal coding experience. I'm a CPA who has always had an interest in programming and tech who is sortof exploring a career change. I don't have any formal education in CS, but I have been working on a side project with some friends of mine that may or may not go anywhere. I have experience using version control with other people, have contributed (minor) changes to open source projects. I have been using debian on desktop for probably about ten years, as well as maintaining a server. Very comfortable in a command line. I also use emacs as my editor of choice, have fooled around with making some major modes and stuff. This is to say, I'm looking for an entry-level job but without the formal education.

2) My actual work experience is four years of work experience in auditing companies. Very knowledgeable about anything financial, would be a good fit for a controller like position, internal audit, etc. Also willing to consult if you have financial reporting or maybe (Canadian) tax questions. Also maybe interested in other finance related jobs if you're looking for a CPA who is interested in tech as well. If interested, please let me know and I'll link you to my Linkedin profile.

https://gitlab.com/nsavage

Email: nick at nicksavage.ca

You're definitely right, with the caveats that other posters have pointed out that there might be benefits from less cleaning as well. My big concern isn't that we're cleaning, but that we're cleaning too much and using that as a justification for doing less of anything else.

You're probably correct that it wasn't called Palestine then or now, but basically the entire period between those two times the name Palestine wasn't that far away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_name_%22Palest...

All the surface cleaning was a massive waste? How about was and continues to be. At least where I live in Ontario, stores still won't let you touch products, require hand washing, wipe down all the carts, etc. It's all theatre that doesn't really do anything to stop the spread of covid but has the benefit of making it look like they are doing something.

Another example is that while schools are closed now again (because they aren't safe), the government until a few weeks ago was bragging about how safe schools were because of their extensive cleaning procedures, which did nothing to make schools safe since ventilation was the key!

I've always found them a bit of an annoyance! Algonquin Park is full of them and they make some of the backcountry routes difficult by changing water levels through it. The amount of beaver dams I have pulled my canoe over!

Semi-related to this is that payroll is a risky area for external auditors. Payments are generalyl made to people who the auditors will never meet (thousands of them for big companies, or more) so there's always a risk that those people don't exist and that someone has fraudulently created an employee (as in, someone who is responsible for hiring people creates John Doe, registers him as an employee, paycheques go to the person responsible). As an auditor, couple of techniques to deal with this risk, such as examining employee files, googling person's name, but my favourite, and probably the most effective, is asking non-management if they know who that person is. If Steve in Shipping doesn't know who John Doe is, when he is apparently also in Shipping, is a sign that something fishy is going on.

Reading the article, the author posed that as the most likely (well, the only) explanation for Mordor.

I'm an auditor, and what you're saying is probably fair, but probably not a big deal. I have a lot of clients who either use Excel for their bookkeeping or provide us their full GL in Excel, so we always have the risk of changes being made, but we're not too concerned since our regular audit procedures would uncover it.

We're required to obtain an understanding of the control environment (so the ERP system in this case), and if we want to rely on its outputs we have to do dedicated testing over it. You're right though that if you do alter one transaction it's probably not going to come up in the audit samples. There's a bit of a gradient though between how much you alter and how much the auditors care, because auditors deal with things on a materiality basis. The more you manipulate the finances, the more material it becomes and the more we care, but also the more likely it will be uncovered. If you're changing a few trivial transactions we more certainly will never uncover it unless you're really unlucky, but then the effects of those trivial transactions is trivial anyways so it's not really a problem.

I'm an external auditor, this is definitely true. Large ERPs have special audits done over their technical systems that we can rely on and not really think too much about whether the system works or not, since another auditor has already signed off that it does.

The purpose is to equalize the amount of tax that companies pay. Consider the following example: Assuming a tax rate of 30%, Company A has net income (profit) of $100 in year 1 and $100 in year two pays $60 in tax on a total profit of $200. Company B has a net loss of $100 in year 1 and net income of $300 ni year 2 has a total profit still of $200. Assuming loss carryforwards are allowed, Company B pays $60 in tax still. Without loss carryforwards, Company B ends up paying $90 in tax on the same amount of profit.

It leads to bad headlines when companies claim a bunch of loss carryforwards, but it actually is a fair practice. The other thing to keep in mind is that losses are only paid out in refunds when you actually pay tax. Company B does not earn $30 back from the government for losing money in year 1, it instead gets money back once it starts making profit.

Note that at least in Canada, these rules apply to all types of income, not just business income, although losses on employment income basically never happen.

In Canada, when you sell the type of things you usually sell at a garage sale, it triggers the "personal use property" rules. It essentially removes any profit from items as long as they are under $1000, so you're safe selling stuff at a garage sale without tax implications.

Location: Ottawa, Ontario

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Currently knowledgeable about Python (including Flask, pyside, and pandas stuff) and emacs lisp. Willing to learn anything though.

CV: Currently no coding experience. I'm a CPA who has always had an interest in programming and tech who is sortof exploring a career change. I don't have any formal education in CS, but I have been working on a side project with some friends of mine that may or may not go anywhere. I have experience using version control with other people, have contributed (minor) changes to open source projects. I have been using debian on desktop for probably about ten years, as well as maintaining a server. Very comfortable in a command line. I also use emacs as my editor of choice, have fooled around with making some major modes and stuff. This is to say, I'm looking for an entry-level job but without the formal education.

My actual work experience is four years of work experience in auditing companies. Very knowledgeable about anything financial. Also willing to consult if you have financial reporting or maybe (Canadian) tax questions. Also maybe interested in other finance related jobs if you're looking for a CPA who is interested in tech as well.

https://gitlab.com/nsavage

Email: nick at nicksavage.ca

That's incredibly cool, I didn't even think of using it for that. I haven't dug into your code, but I know that I use some unusual portions of the subsonic API that you probably haven't included. Are you open to contributions?

I thought it was strange that they highlighted that sentence as well since the rest of the article goes on to dispute that. I'm guessing whoever made the excepts didn't read the rest very well.

An older, maybe more impressive example (just because of the age of it, or maybe because of my interest in it) is the hydrological systems built in Rome itself. I'll have to dig out the book I read this out of, but there is some evidence that a large part of what was the Forum was man made and made of infill, with the Cloaca Maxima [1] (which is still around and working) built to attempt to manage flooding from the Tiber. The Tiber is a silt heavy river, and the sewers requried pretty constant maintenance.

When the Cloaca Maxima was blocked with silt sometime int he early Middle Ages, the Forum began flooding again and ended up buried by modern times under a significant amount of soil. See pictures [2] and [3] of the same structure from (a painting) in the 1800s and modern day after the excavation. It really shows the power of nature and the success of engineering.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca_Maxima [2] Before: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Canalett... [3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/Ro...

This doesn't solve the direct issue, but I use emacs --daemon and either use it to edit files on other computers, or ssh into my main computer to access the daemon directly. It really simplified my workflow trying to get configurations in sync.

Makes sense. I'm a CPA working in audit, and see a huge untapped market. The dirty secret of the audit industry is, at least outside Big 4, the way audit is done is largely the same as it would have been in the 80s - except with Excel. The procedures themselves are pretty similar to what can be done on paper before computers.

I think the issue is that there is not a lot of overlap between accountants and programmers, and some deeply ingrained beliefs in the accounting industry that are pushed by all training materials and university. Accounting is pretty conservative and expectations are always that things this year will be the same as last year. It might be just that the senior leadership came up through these processes so there's no expectation that things should change, since it is just the way it is.

I'm working on a startup that aims to automate sections of my job. It started as a realization that a lot of my job is grunt work that can be done by a machine, so I've created it. I already have a proof of concept program that I'm currently pushing towards becoming a product. It allows me to do better work quicker. I already have interest from my employer in paying for it since it proves it value quickly.

The Avro Arrow being destroyed is a meme in Canada, but there's a lot of questions at least in the historical community on whether that was a blessing in disguise. The state of the art was rapidly moving away from bombers coming over the North Pole (which an interceptor like the Avro Arrow) which would have rendered a fleet of Arrows expensive and useless.

That being said, it destroyed a large part of the Canadian aeronautical industry since Avro ceased operations soon after and the well trained workforce was scattered to the States. There's a long history of Canadian governments doing shortsighted things like killing industries and then paying out of the nose to try to restart the industry every generation/ See shipbuilding in Canada and how Canada can't build ships for its own navy now, despite being one of the largest shipbuilders in the world in the early 20th century.