Eric Release: Rust bindings for the German tax library

First published on Reddit (2024-08-17).

Is Rust used in the tax software industry? No. But will it become more important in the future? Also no.

For everybody else (i.e. mainly cats and dolphins), I made the Rust bindings and SDK for the Elster Rich Client (Eric). Eric is a shared C library provided by the German tax administration which is integrated into a tax application.

The Eric bindings were generated using bindgen which was a very smooth experience.

The functionality of the Eric SDK is currently kept simple (see https://docs.rs/eric-sdk/latest/eric_sdk/struct.Eric.html). It takes an XML file in the XBRL standard for a specified taxonomy, like the company balance sheet, income statement, or any other event in the context of tax declaration, and checks the provided data for plausibility. The validated XML file can then be sent to the tax authorities.

The eric-bindings and eric-sdk were released in v0.4.1 and v0.3.1. Check out the repo for more information: https://github.com/quambene/eric-rs.