Scaffolding Tax Professionals Using the Original Tax Code

The original tax code is the principal source of law. However, because of its enormous size and complexity, most tax professionals rely on secondary sources, which are not accepted as authoritative sources by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) or the courts. To remedy this situation, either the original tax code (IRC) needs to be vastly simplified or a possibly intelligent user interface to the IRC needs to be provided. Opting for the latter approach, we did a qualitative experiment studying the difficulties tax professionals have using the IRC. The results indicate that the problem is not just the code, but that the tax professionals also lack the necessary problem solving skills. Thus, we suggest that if intelligent support systems should have a long-lasting impact, they should not just help solving these complex problems, they should also support the tax professionals in acquiring and refining the necessary problem solving expertise. † Presented at the Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies at the Annual Meeting of the American Accounting Association in San Francisco, 2005. ‡ Mamiko Ono participated in the reported research while she was a graduate student in the Human Factors in Information Design program at Bentley College.