Internet tools for tax professionals: how to get connected and enjoy immediate benefits.

• Author: Cottrell, David M.

Lately it is difficult to find an advertisement in a newspaper or magazine, on radio or television, that is not enticing people to visit the advertiser's World Wide Web site on the Internet. This rush to electronic communications has led to a whole new area of commerce as business transactions take on new formats and occur across time and geographical boundaries in ways not previously possible. This rapid expansion of business transactions and electronic communications has placed tax executives and professionals in the challenging position of needing to access more information, in less time, than ever before.

Fortunately, the same advances in technology that bring new complexities to tax and business issues have also brought new tools to help tax professionals deal with these challenges. For good reasons, most discussions about cutting-edge technology today usually wind up focusing on the Internet in one way or another.

There is a great deal of information on the Internet that can be extremely useful for tax professionals, including tax statutes, tax forms, IRS publications and regulations, information from state tax agencies, and government publications. But it can be a little intimidating for new users who are uncertain where to start. The purpose of this article is to an provide an introduction to the Internet for new users, as well as to provide a summary of the World Wide Web resources that can be of benefit to all tax executives and tax professionals.

What is the Internet?

The Internet is a global collection of thousands of separate, freestanding computers, and computer networks that are linked together by numerous combinations of cables and telephone lines. These computers belong to individual users, major corporations, universities, and a host of other organizations. For this reason, the Internet is commonly referred to as a network of networks. The main objective of this worldwide network is to share resources and information (opinions, experience, research, and other information).

The scope and size of the Internet is constantly changing and growing as more and more resources become available. Currently, somewhere between 40 and 50 million people have access to the Internet, with that number growing by 10 percent each month. The Internet was once the province of government institutions, the military, selected research agencies, and universities. Now, the Internet is now available to everyone.

Each one of the computer sites that are linked together on the Internet manages its own information. Each site stores different information, organized in a different way, with often very different purposes in mind for providing outsiders access to their information. While anyone who wants to connect his or her computer to the Internet has to follow certain technical specifications, there are no corresponding specifications for what information can be placed on their own site. This leads to some confusion about what the Internet is and how to use it.

What Can the Internet

Do for Me?

There is little doubt that the Internet's capabilities and impressive technological advancements make it valuable to computer enthusiasts, but some tax professionals may still be asking "Can the Internet provide any value for me?" This is a fair question to which we believe the answer is a resounding yes. A large measure of the value the Internet offers to tax professionals arises from the changing way computers are used in business. Until recently, the computer has only been used as a tool to compute and process the traditional accounting and tax functions. Now, however, the trend is to use the computer as a research and communication tool. Using the Internet, accountants can now locate vast resources of information, retrieve the information, and format the information for specific needs. The information then can be shared with others in the same building, with an associate in another town, or even with newsgroups read by thousands around the world. The tools needed to accomplish these and other tasks through the Internet are fairly simple to learn and relatively inexpensive to use.

Internet Tools

One of the best ways to gain an understanding of the Internet and how it might add value to a professional practice is to understand the capabilities of the basic tools the Internet offers to users. Another way to become comfortable reading and discussing Internet-related topics is to learn the basic vocabulary that you will encounter. A short list of words and their definitions, as commonly used when discussing Internet-related topics, is shown in Exhibit 1. The remainder of this article is devoted to covering some of the tools for using the Internet.

The tool behind the current explosion of Internet growth is the World Wide Web (WWW). There are, however, several other tools that can be useful to professionals. We will first provide a short description of some of these other tools, and then cover the WWW tax sites in detail.

Electronic Mail (e-mail). Electronic mail or e-mail is the most widely used Internet tool. E-mail provides the ability to exchange electronic messages and to interact almost instantly with anyone connected to the Internet. All of the millions of people around the world who use the Internet have their own e-mail addresses. The basic concepts behind e-mail correspond to those of traditional mail. You send mail to people at their unique e-mail address. They in turn can respond to you at your unique e-mail address.

E-mail, however, has several distinct advantages over...