TaxAlmanac

From TaxAlmanac

TaxAlmanac is a website designed by Intuit, the makers of the professional tax preparation products Lacerte and ProSeries, for tax, financial, and accounting professionals. It is not a consumer tax question site.

Quick Links

In addition to this Overview page, here are some good links for familiarizing yourself with TaxAlmanac, the free online research resource and community for tax professionals: Code of Conduct, Policies, FAQ, and Hints and Tips on How to Search on TaxAlmanac.

Here’s a link to the list of active discussion forums: Discussion_Forum_Index - this is where questions from tax professionals are asked and answered. You'll find many great Tax_Research_Resources on TaxAlmanac as well.

And, before posting to any discussions or starting any articles, be sure to update your user Profile page (user page) to provide some info about your experience level/background as a tax professional. Select edit at the top of that page, replace the boilerplate with your info, and then click Save page.

Collaboration in the Information Age

One hundred years ago during the industrial revolution, specialization became the way to best deliver high quality. You know the picture - one guy on an assembly line putting the same bolt in the same part all day. Publishing used to work the same way. In the Internet era of the 21st century, collaboration is the best way to utilize talent and ensure quality. This is a proven concept. Similar types of collaborative communities (such as eBay, Amazon reviews, and Linux) have revolutionized how people shop, communicate, and work.

Imagine thousands of tax professionals all working together, like iron sharpening iron, to create a robust repository of tax knowledge. Author James Surowiecki points out in his best seller, The Wisdom of Crowds that large groups of people are inherently smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant. TaxAlmanac leverages this powerful phenomenon to provide an innovative, new way to research tax law and share information.

TaxAlmanac is a free tax research resource brought to you by Intuit, the makers of the professional tax preparation products Lacerte and ProSeries. It is a revolutionary leap forward in how tax professionals research tax laws, create and share knowledge. Our goal is to transform tax research and to improve the effectiveness of tax professionals everywhere. TaxAlmanac draws on the power of community. Simply put, none of us is as smart as all of us. Content on TaxAlmanac is written by tax professionals from across the country and takes advantage of the knowledge of academia as well as practitioners - in short, the real tax experts. The site includes key information that tax professionals find useful when conducting research - including the Internal Revenue Code, Treasury Regulations, Tax Court Cases, and a variety of Articles. TaxAlmanac currently contains 101,532 articles.

To see how powerful TaxAlmanac can be we encourage you to visit Wikipedia, the free, online encyclopedia, written collaboratively by volunteers. It is an excellent example of a community providing huge amounts of expert information on a wide variety of topics. It has quickly become one of the most popular reference sites on the Web, receiving 60 million hits per day. Our vision for TaxAlmanac is to offer the same value to tax professionals. The June 6, 2005 edition of Time magazine featured an article on Wikipedia. TaxAlmanac was highlighted as "A Community of Customers" in the hard copy of the Time magazine article entitled "It's a Wiki, Wiki World." The November 21, 2005 edition of Business Week magazine featured an article titled "50 Smart Ways to Use the Web" in which TaxAlmanac was selected as one of the 50. TaxAlmanac made the short list as one of the 7 in the collaboration category.

So, what's the catch? There is no catch. Intuit believes that collectively the tax professional community is smarter than any one individual. The collective knowledge of the entire taxprofessional community is far more powerful than any handful of experts. We are pleased to be able to facilitate the group knowledge and insight of tax pros from all walks of life. We are supporting this site as a way of giving back to the accounting community that has actively supported us.

It's Simple!

• TaxAlmanac includes global search functionality so you can easily search for a particular topic.
• You can create watch lists of articles that are of special interest to you.
• Each article includes a historical look-back so that you can see how it has evolved over time.
• Got a question? You can request a topic in our Discussion Forum. The community will answer it for you, making TaxAlmanac a unique interactive experience.
• Current events are updated regularly to keep you up to date with issues in the profession.
• Check the recent changes page for a list of the most recently edited articles.

Quick Start!

If you haven't read it before, you may want to refer to our Quick Start page to help get started. It's as easy as 1-2-3! After that you may benefit from reading more about TaxAlmanac below.

Intuit's Ongoing Commitment to Tax Professionals

• TaxAlmanac addresses needs that are not solved well by other existing solutions. Current solutions lack robust collaboration between professionals with practical experience. Other solutions may take longer to be updated and fail to tap into the full knowledge of the accounting community.

A Free, Online Community Designed for Tax Professionals

• TaxAlmanac is an ideal, free solution for tax professionals from all walks of life. This site serves as a forum for tax professionals to discuss, share their knowledge, and help one another. You can even set up a bio page to share a little information about yourself and you can email others in the TaxAlmanac community.

Editing

Adding or editing an article is very easy, and is the real growth catalyst for this community. It takes visitors like you contributing to breathe life into TaxAlmanac every day. We need members who contribute their professional experience as much as we need members to fix spelling and grammar. No edit is too small to be helpful. There is some way that you can get involved and improve the community no matter who you are. It only takes a passion to make things better, knowing it will help the entire community.

Whatever you do, don't be afraid! No matter what you do, we can fix it. We keep a revision history of every edit to every page of TaxAlmanac. You can see it on the history tab at the top of the page. The community also monitors changes to the site on the recent changes page on the left. This allows all of us to very quickly clean up anything that gets messed up or needs tweaking in some way.

Policies

TaxAlmanac is a robust repository of tax knowledge. TaxAlmanac is not a forum for fillibusters on the appropriateness nor the legality of the US tax system. Neither is it a threaded discussion for rhetorical debates. You should not post articles that simply advertise particular products (even Intuit products). TaxAlmanac is not a forum for software and hardware support. You may however mention a product in passing if the reference strengthens your point regarding the tax law. TaxAlmanac discourages articles regarding tax evasion and tax schemes. The TaxAlmanac community enforces a "neutral point of view" on all articles. On matters where there is more than one reasonable position, the TaxAlmanac community encourages that all positions be included along with the merits of each. Articles should fairly represent all views on a subject. All views should be given equal weight in their standing. TaxAlmanac's use and contribution terms also expressly prohibits the posting of any copyrighted material for which the poster does not have specific permission to publish.

Authors

TaxAlmanac is a very young website and was built internally by Intuit. Our employees contributed articles on tax and non-tax topics. A group of 30 tax professionals from Intuit wrote approximately 150 articles about tax law and compliance. In addition, we had a team of 5 people from our User Education group write help and other non-tax information.

We also engaged several engineers who imported the Internal Revenue Code and Treasury Regulations from the government website. Now, we are in the process of populating the site with other primary source information.

Now that we are a live beta site, the number of authors and reviewers will grow significantly, thereby adding tremendous value. We hope that many of you reading this right now will be active participants, editors, and reviewers.

Quality

The biggest criticism you hear from skeptics is that a website with tax information that can be edited by an outside community is inherently unreliable. We do not feel this true. First of all, the Internal Revenue Code and Treasury Regulations were imported directly from a government website, and are protected within TaxAlmanac so that users of the website cannot alter these documents.

Secondly, commentary provided by the outside community should be reliable because it is edited by thousands of professionals - like you - who have a vested interest. In addition, the information on the website will become incredibly accurate over time because as more and more people review and edit the articles. A large, participatory audience contributing regularly will drive accuracy and breadth to the site. The breadth and depth of tax knowledge contributed by a large community adds tremendous value.

Community

TaxAlmanac is still very young, but growing. We currently, have an internal community within Intuit comprising about 70 people, and a beta group of outside tax professionals including several thousand people. The internal group is highly active in posting new articles, as well as reviewing content coming in from the outside community.

In addition, a small group of administrators are responsible for deleting, protecting, and moving information on the website, although anyone can add or edit. Finally, three full-time senior leaders are responsible for setting policy, considering suggestions, and overseeing the community.

Intuit

• Intuit Corporate Homepage
• About Intuit
• Intuit's tax products for professionals: Lacerte and ProSeries

Contact Us

• Email: TaxAlmanac@intuit.com
• Write: