A good place to start your tax research is with an encyclopedia. A good encyclopedia will provide a detailed, straight-forward discussion of issues, together with references to important statutes, cases, regulations, and other controlling legal authority.
The standard encyclopedia for tax law research is Tax Management Portfolios. The print version is a large collection of spiral-bound volumes, grouped by broad topic area, with each individual volume covering a specific, narrow set of issues. Volumes are updated by adding new pages and removing pages that are no longer up-to-date. The online version of Tax Management Portfolios is simply an electronic version of the print portfolios, continuously updated.
Tax Management Portfolios are available from both the BNA Tax and Accounting Center and from Bloomberg Law.
If you know the general area of tax law applicable to your research, click on the appropriate link to see a list of portfolios in that area. Select the relevant portfolio and begin expanding the portfolio table of contents to find the discussion that is right on point.
To search by keyword, click on the Indexes link on the left side of the screen, select the appropriate keyword index, and select the heading in that index relevant to your research.
If you know the citation to the Code section (or other document) relevant to your research, you can use that citation as your search term in the Go To Document By Citation search box.
Note that once you retrieve your section, you can choose to see portfolios relevant to the entire section or to a particular subsection. Select portfolios for a subsection of the statute only if you are sure that your question relates to that subsection only.
Note that there are also useful links to Code History and Committee Reports. The former lets you see when different parts of the Code section were added. The latter provides access to Congressional Committee reports, which can be useful in interpreting the language of the Code section.
BNA Tax Management Portfolios are accessible from Bloomberg Law: Tax.
Find the "Go To Portfolio by Number/Name" box and enter a portfolio number, title, or keyword.
Or go to "BNA Portfolios" under "Expert Analysis"
And choose a series, such as "U.S. Income."
You can browse or search both the portfolios and the index.
Or browse the Topical Index from the front page:
