I ported Germany's payroll tax flowchart to TypeScript and got it wrong three times
I expected Germany's payroll tax spec to be a formula. It's a flowchart: boxes and arrows that read and write global variables with names like RE4 (annual gross pay) and ZVE (taxable income). I went looking because expats keep asking me what they'll really take home from a job offer. Every online calculator gives a slightly different answer, and none of them say why. The flowchart is called the…
Germany's payroll tax flowchart, known as the Programmablaufplan (PAP), is a series of boxes and arrows that read and write global variables like RE4 (annual gross pay) and ZVE (taxable income). The Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF) publishes a new flowchart each year, which all payroll software uses to calculate Lohnsteuer, the wage tax taken from employees' paychecks. The author ported this flowchart to TypeScript but found it challenging to get it right, experiencing three major bugs.
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