Tax Knowledge Adventure: Ontologies that Analyze Corporate Tax Transactions

Abstract

Software about U.S. Income Tax has been concentrated on numerical analysis, calculating tax effects where the legal results of transactions are known. In this paper, utilizing ontologies which represent computerized knowledge, tax software can be extended to explain its computation and also educate the user about the domain, corporate tax. Ontologies can be equally useful as a tool for analyzing transactions to determine what the legal implications are. This paper includes 1) designing Corporate Tax ontology that reflects the structure and form of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code (IRC), 2) its application that supports user interactive form filling functionality. Finally, 3) it demonstrates how the end user can learn about the corporate tax consequences. The newly developed software prototype, referred to as Tax Knowledge Adventure or TKA in short, is useful not only for Tax payers but also for government officers to respond to inquiries or appeals with smart reasoning.