Tips and Practice for Finding and Using
Tax Information on the Internet

 

 

1. Introduction

2. Basics of 
Information Analysis
 Preliminaries
Basic Information Analysis - A Review
Information Analysis - Internet Considerations
From Raw Data to Useful Report

3. Practice Exercise
Research Topic
Research Steps
Step 1: State the question(s) for which you are seeking information.
Step 2: Conduct a broad search.
Step 3: Conduct a more focused search.
Step 4: Explore and critique the relevant sites found by the search engines.
Step 5: Complete the research.

 

4. Tax Research on the Internet
Words of Advice
Tax Links

 

5. Summary
Recap
Comments?
Test Your New Knowledge!
For More Information

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Professor Nellen
College of Business
San José State University

Module 4 - Tax Research on the Internet

Words of Advice

  • There are a lot of web pages on the Internet that express some organization or individual's opinion about taxes. There are also many with insufficient support from the law or credible data. Thus, you should be cautious in using many of the tax sites.

  • Despite the great amount of opinions and unsupported  statements that can be found at various web pages, there are also a lot of very reliable tax sites. Many of these sites are maintained by the federal or state governments, or by educators, or law and accounting firms. Many of these sites are noted in the section below.

  • Primary authority in the tax world consists of the Internal Revenue Code, state tax statutes, regulations, IRS rulings, rulings of state tax agencies, court decisions, and legislative proposals. While much of this is on the Internet, not all of it is and it is not set up on a manner that allows for effective search and retrieval. However, several private companies, such as Research Institute of America (RIA), Commerce Clearing House (CCH), West's, Lexis-Nexis, and Tax Analysts, maintain excellent web sites for paid subscribers. These sites are very reliable sources for most tax research questions. 

  • There are several organizations that include tax information on their web sites. These organizations include policy think tanks, industry associations, and taxpayer organizations. These sites may provide research reports on various topics and information (often biased) on current tax topics. You may find some of these sites useful in conducting research. Some of them are listed in the table below.

  • Some tax professors maintain web pages that may have research papers and links to more information. Some of these sites are listed below.

 

Tax Links

Government Sites

Congressional bills http://thomas.loc.gov
House Ways & Means http://www.house.gov/ways_means/
Senate Finance Committee http://www.senate.gov/~finance/
Joint Committee on Taxation http://www.house.gov/jct/
Joint Economic Committee http://www.house.gov/jec/

http://www.senate.gov/~jec/home.html
Treasury Department http://www.ustreas.gov/
IRS http://www.irs.gov/
Government documents including federal register, GAO reports, and federal budget http://www.gpoaccess.gov/multidb.html
California Franchise Tax Board http://www.ftb.ca.gov/
Calif. State Board of Equalization http://www.boe.ca.gov/
California legislative proposals and
legislation		  http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/bilinfo.html
Links to government sites for each state http://www.law.cornell.edu/states/listing.html

Tax Educator Sites

Professor Nellen http://www.cob.sjsu.edu/nellen_a/
Professor Yancey http://www.willyancey.com/
Professor Joseph http://www.bus.utexas.edu/~josephr/384/itaxsrcs.htm

Tax Publisher Sites

Note: You will not be able to view the entire contents of each of these sites if you are not a paid subscriber.

Tax Analysts http://www.tax.org/
RIA Checkpoint http://checkpoint.riag.com/
CCH http://tax.cch.com
Taxware International http://www.taxware.com/
Vertex, Inc. http://www.vertexinc.com/

Organizations with Tax Information

Note: Not all of the sites listed below are objective (that is, some are expressing a particular point of view).

American Bar Association Tax Section http://www.abanet.org/tax/
American Institute of CPAs http://www.aicpa.org
National Association of Enrolled Agents http://www.naea.org/
Tax Foundation http://www.taxfoundation.org/
The Brookings Institute http://www.brook.edu/
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities http://www.cbpp.org/
Citizens for a Sound Economy http://www.cse.org/
National Taxpayers Union http://www.ntu.org

TO DO: Worksheet Question #6 - Use the Congressional Web site (Thomas) to search for a bill in the current Congress on internet taxation. State the bill number and sponsor and provide a brief explanation of what the bill is intended to do and how it relates to the issue of whether e-commerce vendors should be required to collect sales tax.

NEXT - Module 5 - Summary

© Annette Nellen 1999, 2004 Updated on October 31, 2004