ah oui

[Erik Rossen]

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On Fri, 13 Apr 2001, Marc SCHAEFER wrote:

> Do people with a C or B permit automatically get an AHV/AVS number ?

They are obliged to, but they have to make the demand.

> To my knowledge the A permit was cancelled, and if what preceedes is
> right, only people being able to legally work here would have an
> AHV/AVS number.

The people working at the UN and the diplomatic missions do not require
this stuff.  Neither do temporary foreign consultants, I believe.

> Of course I can see cases where people wouldn't, still, such as a
> virtual company with subcompanies in the whole world.

Or simply a multinational company.

> But this is becoming off-topic.

Yes, so I will just explain the reason why I am being so argumentitive and
then stop.  I promise. :-)

Here goes:

* I am a Canadian citizen with a C permit married to a Swiss woman.

* My mother is Canadian, but my father (ethnically Danish) comes from
Germany.

* I live in Switzerland in the canton of Vaud, but I find it more convient
to read stuff in English, not French, and certainly not German.

* Almost all of the computer keyboards that one finds on the market in
this country have a local QWERTZ layout that include accented characters
which are useful for rapidly typing proper names, even if one is normally
typing in English.  But punctuation characters require the ALT-GR modifier
to be used. :-(

* My name is Erik, not Eric.

* I live on a street with an unusually long name.

* My income for the last three years varies between CHF0 per month and
CHF25000 per month.  I have been paid in CHF and Canadian dollars.

* I am a fanatical believer in ISO-8601.

Now, try to design an accounting system that is flexible enough that none
of the above facts cause an exception to a rule buried deep in software.

Gilbert and Alex mentioned that some of the previous accounting projects
have died because each participant was concerned about incorporating
support for their own local variations of methods of doing business.  
This would not have posed a problem if the systems had been designed from
the start to be sufficiently general and modular.  We probably won't get
the design right the first time, but at least we can avoid really grave
errors such as using two-character keys or national government numbers as
primary indices for important tables.

OK, I'm done.

For Denis:  In Canada and the USA, it is (theoretically) illegal to use
Social Insurance Numbers for anything other than tax collection purposes.  
Since citizens are required by law to have such a number, it makes a
tempting method for database designers to track people across databases.  
The wide-spread use of SINs also make life easy for identity thieves.  
Any country concerned about the privacy of its citizens will make the use
of such numbers illegal except for government purposes.


Erik Rossen                         ^
rossen at freesurf.ch                 /e\
http://www.multimania.com/rossen   ---   GPG key ID: 2935D0B9
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