2011 tax research service survey.

• Author: Bonner, Paul

CPAs preparing tax returns, providing tax advice, and working in corporate tax departments need a quick, dependable, and up-to-date source of information to answer the myriad questions that can arise in tax practice. As part of their 2011 annual tax software survey, The Tax Adviser and the Journal of Accountancy asked CPAs about what tax research service or other resource they primarily use and their thoughts on these products' strengths and weaknesses. For the 2011 tax software survey results about tax preparation software, see The Tax Adviser, August 2011, p. 524, and the Journal of Accountancy, September 2011, p. 24.

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More than 10,000 CPAs answered the survey, which asked about seven tax research providers. Of the more than 7,700 respondents who said they subscribed to a tax research service, over half said they used an RIA (Thomson Reuters) product (51%). Users of CCH (Wolters Kluwer) products accounted for another 33% of respondents, and BNA and Intuit represented 8% and 2%, respectively. Except for Intuit, these services were used consistently across firms of all sizes (see Exhibit 1, p. 612). Respondents who said their primary tax research service provider was CFS, LexisNexis, or Tax Analysts together represented a little more than 1 % of respondents, so those products are not tabulated separately in this analysis.

Overall Satisfaction, Likes, and Dislikes

Practitioners generally said they were well pleased with their tax research service overall, with RIA receiving an average rating of 4 out of 5, followed by BNA (3.9), CCH (3.7), and Intuit (3.4). When asked what they liked best about their tax research service, respondents said they most prized their service's comprehensiveness and breadth of material (see Exhibit 2, p. 612). Here, users of CCH were most likely to consider this the service's top virtue (51%), followed closely by RIA and BNA at 48% and 47%, respectively (see Exhibit 3, p. 612). A significant number of users of all products liked quality of content best.

Users of Intuit were far less likely to pick comprehensiveness as the chief attraction (15%), but they were much more likely than users of the other services to be drawn by its price. Thirty percent of Intuit users ranked that aspect highest, followed by 9% of CCH users, 7% of BNA users, and 5% of RIA users. Intuit users also were more likely than others to say its integration with other software was its strongest point (17%, versus between 2%...