I wish the Austrian tax forms were designed so that any intelligent person could fill them out. Most of the labels are unintelligible legalese gibberish plus a reference to the relevant paragraph(s) in the tax code. Which of course is also legalese gibberish, just longer. Some of it you can just skip based on cursory scanning ("This seems to be about vehicles. I'm not trying to claim any vehicle-based expenses -> ignore). Some of it is not so easy. My first tax return took days, though at the time I wouldn't have had the money to pay an accountant, so it had to be done. Now I just fill in the same fields as the previous year, so there's not much point to hire one. They do change the forms in subtle ways to keep you on your toes but as a software developer you're pretty much off the radar of legislators in this country.
I even bought an introductory book on this stuff, but that too assumes you have an accountant and fluffs over the actual mechanics of filing. Grr!
One positive: at least you can do all of it online and the tax code is available as PDFs (thousands upon thousands of pages of course). It also checks simple invariants (e.g. it yells at you if fields A + B must be the same as fields C + D - E and they don't match) and calculates the total amount due.
Edit: Google Translate is trained using EU legal texts, so it does a good job on these forms. This is a translation of part of the VAT (sales tax) form you need to fill out once a quarter or once a month (depending on revenues) as a corporation or self-employed person:
(no, it doesn't make any more sense in German, unless you're a lawyer or accountant, presumably)
Trivia: "young wood" in the second screenshot is an attempted translation of the town "Jungholz", an exclave joined to the rest of the country by a quadripoint[1], which gets the same sales tax rate as Germany, along with Mittelberg, which is not an exclave but only reachable by road via Germany. They apparently even used German currency before introduction of the Euro[2]. The stuff you learn when filing taxes!
I even bought an introductory book on this stuff, but that too assumes you have an accountant and fluffs over the actual mechanics of filing. Grr!
One positive: at least you can do all of it online and the tax code is available as PDFs (thousands upon thousands of pages of course). It also checks simple invariants (e.g. it yells at you if fields A + B must be the same as fields C + D - E and they don't match) and calculates the total amount due.
Edit: Google Translate is trained using EU legal texts, so it does a good job on these forms. This is a translation of part of the VAT (sales tax) form you need to fill out once a quarter or once a month (depending on revenues) as a corporation or self-employed person:
http://imgur.com/a/V6LI1
(no, it doesn't make any more sense in German, unless you're a lawyer or accountant, presumably)
Trivia: "young wood" in the second screenshot is an attempted translation of the town "Jungholz", an exclave joined to the rest of the country by a quadripoint[1], which gets the same sales tax rate as Germany, along with Mittelberg, which is not an exclave but only reachable by road via Germany. They apparently even used German currency before introduction of the Euro[2]. The stuff you learn when filing taxes!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungholz
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelberg