Intuit — www.TaxAlmanac.org - CPA Practice Advisor

From the Jan./Mar. 2008 Review of
Tax Research Systems

[Editors Note: This related article accompanied the review of tax research
systems.] Over the course of just a little more than two years, TaxAlmanac.org
has greatly reshaped how many tax and accounting professionals get their tax
information, interact with peers, and provide their own contributions to the
professional community.

The free online tax research website was created as a “user content-contributed”
site in 2005 by a cadre of Intuit’s tax and technical staff. Their goal
was to provide tax and accounting professionals with a free resource for primary
source materials such as government publications, in addition to giving them
the ability to edit and post articles pertaining to specific tax treatments
and laws, much like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

TaxAlmanac also offers several collaboration functions geared toward tax and
accounting professionals, including the Wiki-style editing tools, discussion
forums, community portal and current events listings. TaxAlmanac’s library
of tax content now stands at more than 49,000 articles written by tax professionals
from across the country, and includes Internal Revenue Code, Treasury Regulations,
Internal Revenue Bulletin material, and general business topics. Content is
divided into major categories for income, deductions, depreciation, credits,
etc. It also offers breaking news information through both the feature article
and “In the News” sections.

Although primarily intended for professionals, many traditional consumers
also utilize the website, which now receives as many as 60,000 hits per day.
TaxAlmanac has received several accolades from the industry and mainstream press,
including Time Magazine and The CPA Technology Advisor, which
awarded the vendor with a Tax & Accounting Technology Innovation
Award in 2006 (www.cpatechnologyadvisor.com/go/1196).

TaxAlmanac’s unofficial motto sums up the concept of the community-based
tax resource quite well: “None of us is as smart as all of us.”
In other words, the collective, real-world knowledge of a group of tax practitioners
is far more effective than an individual’s research in solving tax problems.

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