Tax professionals are inundated with tax developments from all branches of the government and from all levels of government on a daily basis. Our technical tax knowledge expands weekly. Given the immensity of tax law changes in P.L. 119-21 (July 4, 2025), informally named the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), and the guidance we’ll continue to get over the next few years along with non-OBBBA updates, we might run out of time and bandwidth to step back and ask what additional relevance this guidance, as well as various reports issued by the government every day, mean for the well-being of our tax system. This article unpacks select tax law changes and government documents to offer four subtle messages within them. Generally, the messages don’t bode well for an effective tax and revenue system. The article ends with some suggestions on what can help improve our tax system.
Tax Research in an AI World
It has never been harder to do quality tax research than at any time in my 43-year career in tax accounting. In the 1980s, when I was part-time in the industry, there was no internet. Since I was part-time, I ordered Publications 1132, 17, and 334. The rest I found at the library. A few hearty souls might even remember when the post office had stacks of tax forms for the public. Once I went full-time for the 1989 tax season I needed more resources. CCH was my tool of choice. I still used IRS publications and the library. My handy reference guide of choice was, and still is, the QuickFinder. I never used TaxBook much, but it is another good resource for general answers. Then came the internet. The promise was that we would have the world at our fingertips. And for the large part we did, only we forgot some things we would rather keep at an arm’s length. The internet slowly allowed us to replace rooms in our office filled with tax guides and forms with online resources. Law offices and accounting firms often wrote tax articles on narrow tax subjects. Research was easier than ever.
Then came AI.
