Tags: shouldn't we avoid creating nonobvious location-specific tags like 'hmrc'?

Question

The vast majority of users won't recognize the tag hmrc as meaning tax-uk, so if someone says something applicable to other localities they'll miss it. Specifically if you're from elsewhere in Europe and want to compare UK tax treatment vs your own country's vs other European countries. Or thinking of contracting in the UK.

As @Łukasz Lech points out, if we allow hmrc soon we will get mwst, gmbh, pit, krs too.

(We don't want tags for acronyms of 220+ different national or regional tax bodies do we?)

Practically none of us would recognize a question tagged 'Skatteverket' or 'Cadastro de Pessoas Físicas (CPF)' as being synonymous with 'taxes-se' or 'taxes-br'. CPF has 24 possible meanings, btw, so you can't really google it. Why be cryptic, when you can be clear?

Shouldn't we keep the tags as clear and self-explanatory as possible, avoiding location-specific and foreign-language acronyms wherever reasonable?

Answer 1

I agree with hiroto on this. If you have a UK tax question it is a good tag. Similarly if you have a US tax question, irs would be a good tag as well.

However, I would recommend keeping these relatively minimal for now (major areas where we have lots of activity). I am not sure that wa-dor would be a good tag for Washington State business and occupation tax reporting questions....

Answer 2

HMRC is the tax entity for the UK. If you're from the UK and have filled in a single tax form there, you understand what HMRC is - Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs.

You wouldn't be wondering:

"what on earth is that tax entity I've been having to submit forms to yearly since a very young age?"

even if you walked into here as an absolute beginner to freelancing, either - there are several forms and modes of interaction for people and the tax entities they interact with, and hence if you have a question about it, you know what the entity is (you also get your tax ID at a pretty young age in most countries, too)

Keep in mind, Stack Exchange sites are primarily for experts. Not people waltzing in with no prior knowledge. I'm of the opinion that tax bodies should be referred to by name, not a generic tag for tax-country, because they are perfectly understandable to the people they apply to: the experts we want to attract. Those same experts are also who use the tagging system, not the googlers; the googlers look at the content, not the extra info in the tags. Those same experts will enter "HMRC", etc. as a tag.

To fit into the Stack Exchange model, instead of trying to categorize things with a single tag left, right and center, try tagging things that have commonality. Is a question about taxes? add taxes. is a question about the UK? add united-kingdom.

Point is, we should really just allow these tags. They will come. And then we wave a wand and magically they become the tag taxes. (also i should point out that GmbH isn't a tax entity, it's a limited company's initialism in Germany...)

Answer 3

The problem with locally understood acronyms is that they could have also a meaning in some other region, so the people from that region would also start to use it. It would lead to chaos.

Say, you want to use hmrc tag for UK-specific questions. You don't want people from other countries to understand that acronym because they are not the target audience of your question. At first it may sound as reasonable idea.

But in the other country hmrc could mean anything else, for example it could be acronym for taxi driver licence in Brasilia. So under the single tag you would have questions about tax system in UK and about the issues related with being taxi driver in Brasilia. It's no longer so great as you would expect.

The main purpose to make the tags understandable to the whole world is to prevent the situation where they can be unintentionally wrongly used.