Tax standards work begins

<FONT SIZE=2>&#009;A technical committee to foster standards for exchanging tax information using extensible markup language has been formed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, or Oasis. </FONT>

A technical committee to foster standards for exchanging tax information using extensible markup language has been formed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, or Oasis.

Participants include the Internal Revenue Service, the Canadian Customs and Revenue Agency, Inland Revenue of the United Kingdom as well as IBM Corp., Oracle Corp. and SAP AG. The committee will build a common vocabulary of terms, XML templates and guidelines for implementation.

"Software vendors and tax agencies will no longer need to maintain jurisdictional specific applications and interchange standards. [Customer relationship management], payroll and financial developers will be able to reduce their system integration costs," said Gregory Carson of the IRS, who chairs the committee.