An International Meeting of the American Accounting Association 2005 Annual Meeting August 7–10, 2005 San Francisco, California Come to the City by the Bay!

Effective Learning Strategies Forum
Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Session 28
Re-Connecting Students of Taxation with the Internal Revenue Code

Presenters:
Brigitte W. Muehlmann, Bentley College
Roland Hubscher, Bentley College
Mamiko Ono, Monitor Group

Description:
Key Issue: The Internal Revenue code (IRC) is the primary source of tax law. Thus it is a vital contributor of information of the study of taxation. Unfortunately, today's tax students increasingly do not work with the IRC any longer when conducting tax research. Experiments with graduate tax students show that the main problems in using the IRC are caused by the complexity and size of the tax code and by students' difficulty to devise an effective problem solving strategy.

Key Concept: The Internal Revenue Code reminds us of written code of an over 90 year old computer program that has grown from 27 pages in 1913 to over 5,000 pages in 2005 and its rules are related to each other in a complicated network. Even carefully written computer programs require extensive documentation to be understood and maintained in the future. How is anyone supposed to understand the complex maze of the tax code, given that there is not even any clear documentation associated with it?

In computer science, documentation means the organized collection of records that describe the structure, purpose, operation, maintenance, and data requirements for a computer program. Like pieces of a puzzle, tax records are publicly available, but not in the form of an organized collection. Applying the theory of documentation from computer science to the tax code leads to a new model of providing a framework to integrate the many pieces of the tax puzzle into an understandable whole.

Learning outcome: Students will learn to appreciate the role and contents of the IRC in a new light.

Back to Wednesday Sessions

AAA Home Page