If you're based in the UK, and work on bespoke corporate systems, you are probably having "fun" at the moment. If you are a consultant, you're probably rubbing your hands - but if (like me) you are a salaried employee, you are probably hastily running searches over every piece of code and customer-facing document looking for anything that looks like 17.5, 1.175, 0.175, etc.
Why? A number (essentially: sales tax) that has been constant since 1991 is changing from 17.5% to 15%... in one weeks time (correction: 5 days).
Of course, in a perfect world, every system will get this number from a configuration file, database, etc - but I'm happy to bet that it has snuck into more places than we care to imagine. Time to start paying back that code debt, people...
