Techie exposed giant tax grab, maybe made government change the rules

Custom text fields can be a powerful form of protest

Who, Me? The only certainties in life are death, taxes … and tech causing trouble, a topic that The Register covers each week in this reader-contributed column we call “Who, Me?” that celebrates the moments you made trouble at work and somehow escaped.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Dillon,” who told us of a time he worked on the point-of-sale (POS) team for what he described as “my home city's most prominent retailer.”

“It was the kind of fancy store that had a classy steakhouse on the top floor, complete with a piano player and a bar – the kind of place where the city's movers and shakers went to move and shake,” he explained.

Some of those movers and shakers ran the local professional sporting team, and as Dillon tells it, they “threw perennial tantrums and threatened to leave town if we didn't build them a new stadium.”

The city council eventually agreed.

“To raise funds to pay the ransom for the stadium, the city levied a large suite of new sales taxes,” Dillon explained. “They added an extra tax on top of the state's general merchandise tax. They put a tax on restaurant food, and another on liquor served at bars. And they doubled the food and liquor taxes during times a venue featured live entertainment.”

“The only items remaining untaxed in our restaurant were the napkins,” he bemoaned.

Dillon got the job of ensuring his store listed all the new taxes on the steak restaurant’s receipts.

“Our POS software package supported a maximum of four tax categories, and it was of course only natural to implement them by dedicating one category to each of the new taxes,” Dillon told Who, Me?

That decision meant receipts in the fancy steakhouse soon included four lines of tax information.

“Receipts listed the customer's vice of choice, and noted their money was being collected by the city to pay for the stadium.”

The resulting monster-length receipts meant the city’s movers and shakers could not help but see the city government’s tax take – four times on each receipt.

Dillon was satisfied that this arrangement meant his customers were well-informed and his employer was compliant with all applicable laws.

And one of those laws soon changed.

“The city started requiring that sales taxes on all receipts be printed as a single amount, rather than itemizing different aspects of poor governance,” he told Who, Me?

Did Dillon’s receipt scheme lead to that change? We’ll never know. But he never experienced any blowback!

Have you made a technical choice that made waves in the world? If so, click here to send us an email so we can celebrate your success in a future edition of Who, Me? ®