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The American Institute of CPAs’ Core Competency Framework for Entry into the Accounting Profession (Framework) recommends that accounting programs offer curricula based on skills rather than traditional content-based courses. To this end, the Framework identifies six functional competencies that all students should possess to succeed in the accounting profession. This website relates directly to two—research and technology. The Framework indicates that entry-level professionals must possess “strong research skills to access relevant guidance” and “skills to use technology tools effectively and efficiently.”

Effective and Efficient Searching

Students desiring tax careers must learn to conduct tax research using electronic databases and to do so effectively and efficiently. Effective searches for information retrieve the documents relevant to the research assignment, while efficient searches retrieve relevant documents in the least amount of time (i.e., without retrieving large numbers of irrelevant documents through which you must wade). Textbooks often describe tax research as a six-step process:

  1. Gather pertinent facts,

  2. Identify research issues,

  3. Locate tax authority,

  4. Interpret and apply authority,

  5. Develop conclusions and recommendations, and

  6. Communicate results.

Each step is vital. Particularly in the first four steps, students who are ineffective or inefficient reach flawed conclusions or waste time, a scarce resource for tax professionals. This website’s objective is to improve your ability to effectively and efficiently complete step three of the tax research process (i.e., to locate authority) using electronic resources.

Though most students have “surfed the web” searching for information, many do not effectively and efficiently conduct searches for tax authority. The author’s experience has been that students routinely fail to locate the most relevant authorities (such as key judicial decisions) in class assignments requiring tax research. Further, students who do locate relevant authorities often do so using inefficient, circuitous search techniques that, once they enter professional practice, result in extra time that limits opportunities for career advancement. For instance, students often formulate simplistic “keyword” search requests and usually do not consider “non-keyword” approaches.

Even some seasoned professionals can improve their search strategies. An online legal service representative indicated that “the vast majority of legal online searchers simply do not get beyond the basics” and that this creates “a serious problem in law firms.” (See Teresa Pritchard-Schoch, “Teaching Online Legal Research,” Online, November 1993.) Michele Quigley, RIA Account Manager, says she has “found that tax professionals do not take full advantage of the research capabilities that online research makes available. Many tax professionals have only skimmed the surface of how research on the Internet can be done both to vastly improve the accuracy and depth of the answers they find and to actually reduce the amount of time they spend finding those answers.”

This website provides students and professionals with strategies for effective and efficient searches and helps them to avoid common pitfalls when locating tax authority (step #3 in the tax research process). Individuals mastering these strategies become “power searchers” and demonstrate research and technology competencies needed for success in the accounting or legal profession.

Tax professors desiring to improve their students’ electronic search skills might make this class assignment. For empirical evidence the class assignment improves student learning, see Diaz III and Larkins, “Improving the Effectiveness and Efficiency of Boolean Searches for Relevant Tax Authority,” Journal of Legal Tax Research, 4 (2006), pp. 135-50.

Tax students and professionals wishing to improve communication skills can visit the M.Tx. Writing Web Site. Also, visit the Evaluating Tax Authority site for guidance, practice, and feedback when interpreting tax law, the Marginal Tax Rates site to improve your ability to reach conclusions and make recommendations, and the Identifying Tax Issues site to enhance your skill at recognizing tax research questions.


Website Overview

The frame to the left provides a map to this website. The “Strategic Searching” lessons assist tax students and professionals to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their electronic searches. Each lesson assumes basic knowledge of electronic tax research and, thus, focuses on strategies for locating tax authority.

After reading the three “Strategic Searching” lessons, check your abilities with the matching and fill-in-the-blank “Self-Tests.” For the matching self-tests, you receive a fact pattern followed by a series of search requests and match each search request with a list of descriptors (e.g., likely misses key authorities or pulls too many documents). For the fill-in-the-blank self-tests, you receive a fact pattern followed by a partial search request and provide connectors and keywords to complete the request. For both types of tests, your choices are evaluated, and you receive a numerical score. Links provide guidance and a recommended solution for each self-test.

To accommodate as many users as possible, each self-test is tailored to a variety of electronic research services: CCH Tax Research Network, LEXIS, RIA CheckPoint, Tax Analysts, and Westlaw. Choose the service you normally use to conduct tax research, and each self-test will contain the unique features with which you are familiar (e.g., connectors and universal characters).

Miscellaneous Items

“About Project” provides general information about this website, its author, and people the author wishes to acknowledge. It also provides contact information for the major providers of electronic tax research services.

Please help improve the site by completing the one-minute “Short Exit Questionnaire.” If you experience difficulty viewing some of the web pages or if some of the pages do not align correctly, check to see if the “Viewing Problems” link in the left frame provides any suggestions.

Thank you for visiting my web site! Also, check out the Identifying Tax Issues site to enhance your ability to identifying and express tax questions, the M.Tx. Writing Web Site to improve your sentence construction, research memos, client letters, and judicial briefs (step #6 of the tax research process), the Evaluating Tax Authority site to improve your interpretation of tax law (step #4), and the Marginal Tax Rates Site to enhance your ability to reach conclusions and make recommendations (step #5).