this problem is so gloriously Japanese it hurts.
we want to set sales tax to 0%
sorry, can’t do it.
why not?
software was never designed to have a 0% tax and it will make every cash register turn inside out.
but we want it to be 0%
then put in a RFC and we’ll take a look once we have some free cycles
So make it 0.1%. Close enough to make people happy, but not zero to appease the f-ed up software.
I mean 1% even would be pretty low.
I don’t see the problem. Drop the tax and if the companies can’t handle it, they continue to pay it. And once it costs them money they will fix it in 1 week instead of a year.
Unfortunately the tax is added at the register and paid by the consumer, so if they just do nothing the companies end up with extra money that they can then just not pass on to the government relatively easily, while consumers still see a tax on their receipts that should not exist.
Japan, unlike the US, shows final total price on the shelves/product. Customers know what they’ll pay the whole time
I doubt a business will have many customers if they’re charging significantly more than their competitors due to still charging taxes
They display it on the shelf (though some stores still display both before/after tax because the final price is only required since 2021), but registers calculate it separately and the tax appears on receipts.
Yes, the tax is paid by the consumers. But, those consumers will probably not be willing to pay more just because the company was too slow in updating their cash registers. So the problem quickly solves itself.
But it’s in the interest of each business to charge as little as possible while maintaining profit.
So if a competitor of yours is able to not charge tax then you’d better get your act in gear to remain competitive.
There’s also an incentive to be the first to offer the tax free sales so it should sort itself out over time.
yeah I totally want to, guys, it’s these damn cash registers to blame!
Be nice. These people are still using fax machines and floppy disks.
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?
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.
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.
I agree with division/multiplication issue. Or maybe just simply an assumption that VAT is always there and sanity checks on the systems just won’t allow 0 (or negative number) as a tax percentage.
I meant that in general even ‘official’ systems have stupid bugs or practices just because things have been in a certain way for long time. Years ago I wrote a small invoicing program which had obviously manage VAT and it would’ve been a simple mistake to assume that VAT (or any tax percentage) is just a whole number since that’s what I’ve ever seen before. That particular piece of software is well obsolete now, but that would’ve managed the decimals since it handled all the numbers in the same way just to keep things simple and monetary values obviously need decimals. However, without any verification it wouldn’t been a crazy assumption to store tax percentages as a two digit integer everywhere.
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.
Huh, I hadn’t considered division. I guess that would explain why 0 is harder than 1, at least for tax rate. They must have already been able to handle 0 computed tax e.g. 5円 at 8%.
Have you actually seen a technical discussion about this? I find it fascinating
We had something stupid like they when tax rate was set to I think 7.5% instead of 7% and they discovered most tax software couldn’t handle decimals.
