RE: [tax] Tax XML Suggested Direction

[Andy Greener <andy@gid.co.uk>]

Rod Quiney writes:

>A staged approach would involve:
>
>1. Focus on Business Context:  canvass the members of the Technical Chapter
>(TC) to identify our top 5 interoperability problems/issues/opportunities
>where a Tax XML standard may provide value; this would serve to clarify why
>we are engaged in the TC, what we hope to accomplish, how we may make use of
>the results, and how they will be beneficial to our organizations.

We are in agreement here; this echoes my earlier response to John and
Michael's suggested approach, ie "why" - if we can answer that satisfactorily
then I think we'll be in a position to carve out some useful work for
ourselves.

>2. Synthesize Member Input:  identify common problems/issues/opportunities
>providing a basis for collaboration.
>
>3. Review Existing Tax-related XML Standards:  analyse current standards
>classifying tax information (non-XML and XML classification schemas), e.g.
>GIFI, ebXML, XBRL, TaXML, etc. their strengths, weaknesses and how they are
>being used by member organizations and others; determine if existing
>standards could or should be used to address common issues; if not, define
>the gap - what more is needed.

I know you've mentioned ebXML - I'd go further and say that we need to
analyse current modularisation techniques (including ebXML's Core
Components). Having read the Gartner report kindly posted by John I
followed the reference to the ANSI ASC X12 reference model for XML design
(the best cure for insomnia I've found in a while ;-), which is fairly
closely aligned with ebXML Core Components and the UBL initiatives for
re-usable business documents. I like the idea of document templates
united, via defined contexts, with re-usable modules to produce schemas
for specific instance documents - it fits well with the notion of a
manageable set of universal tax document templates combined with re-usable
modules representing, for instance, taxpayer identity, taxpayer address,
agent identity, financial data, compliance data, etc., within geopolitical
or tax-related business process contexts. Most of the framework that we
would need seems to be there already - our job may simply be to apply the
domain-specific expertise to extend a set of business-oriented standards
into the taxation domain.

Of course we will need to consider non-tax-specific XML standards as
well (naming/id and addressing being obvious ones) since they are likely
to form the guts of many of the re-usable modules in a document template.

	Andy
	(For UK Inland Revenue)
-- 

Andy Greener                         Mob: +44 7836 331933
GID Ltd, Reading, UK                 Tel: +44 118 956 1248
andy@gid.co.uk                       Fax: +44 118 958 9005