Tax Simplification: Use Data

This year, I hope politicians on both sides of the aisle heed professor Annette Nellen's advice to simplify tax law.  Nellen's article, for the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) highlights remarks by IRS Commissioner Douglas H. Shulman on simplifying tax law.  Nellen provides a table showing broad agreement between the Commissioner's... [Read More]

Tax Experts vs. Robots?

In the battle between robots and legal experts, I have a stake in both camps. On the one hand, the site we're developing at Tabulaw, tax26.com, relies heavily on automated parsing of tax law information, in order to organize and display it intelligently for professionals.  On the other hand, this... [Read More]

How to Convert HTML to Text, With Formatting

My current best answer: this html2text package from Germany.  It can be installed easily on a MacOS with Macports ($ sudo port install html2text), and on other Unix-like systems through their package managers.  It has a number of useful options, and I use it like this:html2text -nobs -ascii -width 200 -style... [Read More]

Legislative Model: How Much to Open Source?

Should legislative data schemes be open source?  That is the question that Grant Vergottini raises in his blog post today, To Go Open Source or Not.  It's a thought-provoking topic and I encourage you to join the discussion on Grant's blog. Some background and a bit of my thinking is... [Read More]