Brazil is the country where companies spend the most to find out how much tax they should pay on a product. This process is so complicated that it consumes more than half of all software development professionals available. I'm one of them, and I can't stand working with this shit anymore. I have other projects, but I can never get rid of this niche that is more profitable. It sucks when even though you do what you love, you use it for such a stupid purpose, which is to calculate how much you should give to the government.

I have a couple Brazilian colleagues who came to this global-but-in-thuth-indian logistics company and said something similar... at first.
Lots of client companies here simply pay no taxes and challenge governments to come and get them.
We literally factor our clients' expected "get-away-ness" (tax evasion rate) in our optimization models.
The world is ugly. Accounting just measures how much.

Not paying taxes is not an option for big companies here (which is my niche). Now, it's so complicated that I doubt very much that any company will be able to actually calculate a tax right. What happens is that government inspection calculates an average that it should give, and decides whether or not what the company is paying is good for their pocket.

@codingfreedom just pay too much and let the government calculate the returns?

@electrineer What returns?
Government will say that they did the math wrong and you were right

@electrineer This question of yours reminded me of a case. An American consultant from a large company (begins with Ora and ends with cle) came to visit the company I worked for at the time, and when he saw an entire floor of the building full of consultants creating rules to calculate taxes, he was irate: IMPOSSIBLE! HOW CAN IT BE SO COMPLICATED TO CALCULATE A TAX!

And he added to his arrogance: GIVE ME A CALCULATOR AND I'LL CALCULATE IT.

My boss at the time took out a book that was bigger than War and Peace, called "Tabela TIPI", put it on his desk and said: Alright, calculate the tax on a can of soda leaving a distribution center in Mato Grosso, going to São Paulo. Give me the value of ICMS, PIS, COFINS, ST, DIFAL, FCOP taxes and remember that you will have to compose the MVA.

We never saw him again.

I am surprised that it isn't Germany with all the bureaucracy.

@codingfreedom

As a colleague of Oracle Retail, I feel your pain.

We joke that we open SR to win time on analyzing and fix the issue, it isn't to get a solution from Oracle.

Do you work in all OR apps or are you specialized in some?

@pmso Dangerous question. I want keep devRant a safe place to me.

Upvoted just cause this is such an interesting global trivia

Wait, why can you decide how much to give to the government? 😂