The CPA Journal

Tax Analysts is well known for its subscription print publications, but its website, www.tax.org, serves tax practitioners with a wide range of information resources on federal, state, and international tax topics in both print and electronic format. The user-friendly site offers access to free services, as well as to paid subscription services. Much of the international information is not easily found elsewhere.

The website presents paid subscriptions to Tax Analysts’ Tax Notes, State Tax Notes, and Tax Notes International publications, newsletters, and its federal, state, and international tax research services. The website also offers access to Tax Analysts’ transfer pricing publications, tax treaty information, and coverage of the European Union and the United Kingdom, which should be helpful for tax professionals who practice in the international arena.

Free information not readily available elsewhere includes its “Free Bulletins” and “Tax Policy Readings,” which can be located through buttons on the home page. The bulletins are weekly and monthly e-mail bulletins on specific topics under federal, state, and international headings. The downloadable policy readings cover a variety of federal and international tax topics in alphabetical order, including controlled foreign corporations and foreign tax credits.

The website’s other offerings include downloadable monthly self-study programs, CD-ROMs, and tax research seminars. On a more scholarly note, the website offers the “Tax History Project,” a history of American taxation, the “Basic World Tax Code,” a framework for harmonizing tax laws around the world, and access to the archives of the National Tax Journal, which publishes research on government finance. Other materials, such as tax glossaries, are also available. The “Tax Links” provides a compact but useful list of links to federal, state, and international sources, some of which were new to this reviewer.

For those who appreciate that “tax” and “fun” are not mutually exclusive, www.tax.org has a “Tax Quotes” section, with an extensive list of quotations, some humorous, some serious. Inasmuch as death and taxes unite us all, even the least tax-savvy among us will enjoy them. The quotations can come in handy for a client newsletter, speech-writing, or sprucing up a website.

The website is well organized, with easy-to-interpret left-hand indexes that appear on most of the screens. The links and documents download quickly, and moving back and forth between pages is easy. The easy-to-remember URL is a big plus.

The CPA Journal is broadly recognized as an outstanding, technical-refereed publication aimed at public practitioners, management, educators, and other accounting professionals. It is edited by CPAs for CPAs. Our goal is to provide CPAs and other accounting professionals with the information and news to enable them to be successful accountants, managers, and executives in today's practice environments.