Moby Kip mentions the one thing I really don’t like about gay marriage: Software changes.
H&R Block has agreed to give $100 coupons or free TaxCut software to all gay couples who incurred additional costs because they were barred from using the company’s online tax service, TaxCut Online.
I understand how H&R Block’s programmers must feel.
One of my jobs is to maintain software that pulls data from a database of employees and their families and generates update files that are sent to the insurance companies providing their benefits.
Now that we have all this gay marriage, there are all these questions we’re going to have to answer: Do we send same-sex married people as married? Or as civil unions? Or do we need a separate category for same-sex marriages? If they used to be civil-unioned and are now married, does that count as a change in status?
The answers have nothing to do with the meaning of marriage in any cultural sense. It’s mostly a matter of figuring out how the insurance companies want us to send the data. Which means we can’t solve the problem until their programmers solve their side of the problem.
Their programmers can’t solve the problem until the lawyers and actuaries and managers make policy decisions, and those policy decisions depend on rule-making by federal and state regulatory bodies, which depend on decisions by legislatures and courts.
We’re talking months of lead-time for all those decisions to filter down to us folks who write the code. We’ll probably be making changes right up until the deadlines.
I don’t know, but my guess is that something was changing in Connecticut tax law and H&R Block’s software group couldn’t meet the release deadline to get the change out there, so they left it as an unsupported case.
Social change is hard.
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