This web page was prepared for presentations for the Virginia
Society of CPAs and the Florida Institute of CPAs . Below are
listed sites that would be of interest to accounting and tax
practitioners.
Internet Search Engines
Search engines attempt to make some sense out of the rather disorganized mass of data that is the World Wide Web. The following sites are examples of search engines.
 | Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com) |
| AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com) |
| InfoSeek (http://www.infoseek.com) |
| MetaCrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com) |
Note that these sites are generally not the best to use for
"pure" tax research. For that, see the list of tax
specific link sites below.
Tax Related Link Sites
One of the most important things to find when doing web-based tax research is to find sites that give you updated links to tax and professional information. These sites serve as an index to professional information on the net and will be the single most important free resources you find on the Internet.
| Tax Sites (http://www.taxsites.com) - a site maintained by Dennis Schmidt of the University of Northern Iowa that has a wide variety of links, especially to court opinions. For me, this site serves as the most important tax related site on the Internet and should be at the top of your bookmarks. |
| Will Yancey's Tax Site Index (http://www.willyancey.com) - This site is very similar to the site run by Dennis Schmidt. You should bookmark it as well, just in case you hit one of those internet glitches when you can't reach TaxSites. Also, you might find the structure of this site more to your liking if you are using an older browser. |
| Tax Resources (http://www.TaxResources.com) - a site that lists a large number of tax related sites on the internet, maintained by Frank McNeill. Frank has a section that organizes where to look to find daily, weekly and monthly updates and also has a slant towards expat tax issues. |
| BenefitsLink (http://www.benefitslink.com) - This site provides resources of interest to those involved with qualified plans and other employee benefit programs. The site also houses discussion boards on topics related to employee benefits. If you do anything related to qualified retirement plans in your practice, you need to know about this site. |
| Barry Rubin's State Tax Links (http://www.rubincpa.com/tax/statelink.html) - links to sites run by the various state departments of revenue and state sponsored sites that have government forms for download. I find this "all in one" listing of the state revenue departments to be very useful when trying to run down a state tax form or gain access to some state's tax statutes. |
Tax Related Web Sites
As a sampler, here are some important tax related sites.
| AICPA Web Site (http://www.aicpa.org) - various documents from the AICPA and links to related sites |
| Arizona Society of CPAs (http://www.ascpa.com) - Since one of the authors is an Arizona CPA, this site is automatically included. |
| Wyoming Society of CPAs (http://www.wyocpa.org) - The home society of the other author of this presentation. |
| Virginia Society of CPAs (http://www.vspca.com) - The VSCPA's web site including information of interest to Virginia CPAs. |
| Florida Institute of CPAs (http://www.ficpa.org) - The FICPA's web site including information of interest to Florida CPAs |
| Auditnet (http://www.auditnet.org) - Links related to auditing |
| FASB (http//www.fasb.org) - Financial Accounting Standards Board |
| IRS Web Site (http://www.irs.gov) - IRS forms, publications and other information from the Internal Revenue Service |
| U.S. Tax Court (http://www.ustaxcourt.gov) - The Tax Court's official web site. Opinions are posted here, but only from January 1999 forward. |
| Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://stats.bls.gov) - this site contains a large database of statistics compiled by this agency, the most important of which is the Consumer Price Index. |
| Tax Analysts News Site (http://www.tax.org/TodaysTaxNews) - A site that is updated regularly with stories from Tax Notes Today. |
| Research Institute of America (http://www.riatax.com) - This site is updated weekly with articles from RIA's newsletters. |
| Thomas Legislative Site (http://thomas.loc.gov) - This site contains information on Congressional activities, including copies of bills before Congress. You can use this site to follow a tax bill as it moves through the system, and download versions as soon as they become available (no more waiting for your tax service to mail out copies of the bills). |
| GPO Federal Register Site (http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/aces140.html) - the federal register for the past two years can be searched via this site. The site is useful to get the text of proposed and final regulations as they are published. |
| Kelly Blue Book (http://www.kbb.com) - This site provides automated access to information on car values. |
Tax Related Discussion Groups and Mailing Lists
Believe it or not, there are actually CPAs, attorneys and the like that just love to discuss professional tax issues in public. And, generally, you can read what they write and, if you wish, even participate on your own. If you follow these groups, you will quickly discover just who likely knows what they are talking about and who is likely to just be spouting off without having adequate support. But once you've qualified the sources, you'll find there's a lot of useful information here, as well as providing you with some of the most current discussions of breaking developments in tax law.
| Usenet newsgroup
misc.taxes.moderated - If the link to the left
doesn't work, you likely aren't property set up to use a
newsreader. If so, check below for the Remarq web site
and go hit the manuals for your internet software. Usenet
is a vast, worldwide discussion system that actually
predates the Internet (even when it was known as
ARPANET). This particular group is a moderated group
(meaning that all posts are cleared by a moderator to
keep out the riff-raff) that discusses tax related
issues. It also is the largest and most active such group
I've found anywhere on the net. If nothing else, collect
the messages and use them as a way to keep up on
continuing developments even if you don't find the time
to participate. There is a closely related unmoderated
group (misc.taxes) that
also discusses tax issues, but tends to be overrun with
tax protest missives. Other groups you may find of interest include misc.invest.financial-plan and alt.accounting. The financial planning group is also moderated, though many different types of professionals frequent the group. Estate planning issues are known to be discussed there. The accounting group is an unmoderated group (anything posted appears on the group) and tends to concentrate on computerized accounting systems (lots of posts about QuickBooks and other low end accounting programs). |
| Remarq (http://www.remarq.com) - If you can't figure out how to access usenet discussion groups otherwise, this free web service provides access to a number of groups, including misc.taxes.moderated and misc.invest.financial-plan. |
| Deja.com (http://www.deja.com) - This site archives posts to usenet and can be used to search discussions in the various newsgroups noted above. |
| American Bar Association Tax Discussion Groups (http://www.abanet.org/tax/discuss.html) - This page has information on signing up for the ABA-TAX mailing list in the presentation. This group features regular posts by attorneys and CPAs on technical tax issues. The volume is not up to the level of misc.taxes.moderated, but the issues raised in the group tend to be more professionally oriented as a rule. |
| American Bar Association Estate Planning List Website (http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/aba-ptl.html) - This list discusses very technical issues regarding estate planning. Virtually all posts to this list come from attorneys, though membership in the list is not currently limited to attorneys. Use this resource intelligently, mainly as a resource. While it is not clear that posts from non-attorneys are unwelcome, I suspect that if a significant number of non-attorney posts appeared on the list that it might reduce participation by the attorneys currently posting or lead to a call for closing the list. |
| BenefitsLink Message Boards (http://www.benefitslink.com/messageboards/index.shtml) - David Baker's site, in addition to being a wonderful source of employee benefits information, also hosts an incredible variety of discussion groups related to specific issues that arise in the employee benefit plan arena. |
| AICPA Forums (http://www.aicpa.org/forums/index.htm) - The AICPA has their own discussion groups at their web site. Currently the site is not the easiest to use and has a number of quirks. Rumor has it that the forums will be improved in the near future, but for now the site is primarily a low volume posting site. |
Commercial Tax Research Sites
The commercial publishers have noticed that they could use the web to deliver their products, and most of the major publishers now have sites you can pay for access to. For the most part, these sites duplicate what the services offer in paper or on CDs, but the big advantage is that you can access this information from anywhere (not just on your LAN) and, in some cases, you get far more current information than any CD service could deliver.
| TaxAnalysts TaxBase (http://taxbase.tax.org) - This is a current information site, with the ability to subscribe to electronic versions of Tax Notes Today and other daily publications. These publications give you access to virtually all the source documents produced by the government (bills, IRS rulings, court cases, etc.) and interested parties (AICPA and ABA testimony on proposed regulations and bills) the day after they are released. You also have access to a number of years historical documents. |
| CCH Tax News Direct (http://tax.cch.com/full/room306.htm) - This service is similar to the Tax Analysts product noted above. The major difference is that you can set it to only deliver the news you are interested in (a plus), does not claim to deliver all new developments (a minus), will deliver the news directly to your email box (a plus) and it has only a one year archive of old data (a minus). Currently it is priced at about half the price of the Tax Analysts product and definitely deserves a look. |
| CCH U.S. Master Tax Guide Plus (http://tax.cch.com/full/library/srcedocs/srcedocs.htm) - A very interesting tax research offering from CCH, it offers access to the U.S. Master Tax Guide as well as a complete library of source documents at a very reasonable price ($299 for a one year subscription to federal documents). Where this service really shines is in the court case coverage, providing all cases from the Tax Court (both regular and memorandum decisions) back to the founding of the court, as well as all cases reported in the US Tax Cases from 1913 forward, which has always been the most significant shortcoming of the CD source document services from Tax Analysts and Kleinrocks. |
| WestDoc (http://www.westdoc.com) - This site gives access to West Publishing's entire case and law database and can retrieve any document and send it to your machine for a reasonable fee ($10.00 when I wrote this, but check to see if that is current). The site's per access pricing is a welcome change from the "buy everything or get nothing" approach of most other sites. The charges would make likely make this site too expensive to use for documents are regularly accessed (remember that for the price of 30 accesses, you could buy the CCH product above), but it does work very well to fill in the holes for items you need rarely. |
| BNA Portfolios on the Web (http://www.bna.com/tmweb/portweb.htm) - BNA's portfolios are available as a web based product. Pricing is very similar to the CD version of the service. |
| CCH Internet Tax Research Network (http://tax.cch.com/full/room101.htm) - CCH offers access to their main subscription products at this site (such as the Standard Federal Tax Reporter, with pricing that is very similar to what is charged for their CD and print services. |
| RIA Checkpoint (http://checkpoint.riag.com/) - RIA offers access to their main subscription services (including the Federal Tax Coordinator 2d) at this site, with pricing very similar to their pricing for print or CD access. |
Comments on this site should be sent to Ed Zollars