2011: Tax Research Service Survey: Users Value Breadth of Coverage, Ease in Finding Answers
CPA tax preparers' attitudes toward their tax research services in some respects reflect a universal quandary of the Information Age: They re pleased to have so much material at their fingertips, but despite modern aids such as keyword searching, are still often frustrated in tracking down a particular desired bit of it. They supplement their paid tax research service with a variety of governmental and free online resources. These were among findings in the 2011 annual tax software survey by the JofA and The Tax Adviser, which besides asking about tax preparation software, for the first time this year also asked CPAs about what tax research service or other resource they primarily use and their thoughts on these products' strengths and weaknesses. More than 10,000 CPAs answered the survey, which asked them about seven tax research providers. Of the more than 7,700 respondents who said they subscribed to a tax research service, more than half said they used an RIA (Thomson Reuters) product (51%). Users of CCH (Wolters Kluwer) products accounted for another 33% of respondents, and BNA and Intuit represented 8% and 2%, respectively. Except for Intuit, these services were used consistently across firms of all sizes (see Exhibit 1). Respondents who said their primary tax research service provider was CFS, LexisNexis or Tax Analysts together represented a little more than 1% of respondents, so those products are not tabulated separately in this analysis. OVERALL SATISFACTION, LIKES AND DISLIKES Practitioners generally said they were well pleased with their tax research service overall, with RIA receiving an average rating of 4 out of 5, followed by BNA (3.9), CCH (3.7) and Intuit (3.4). When asked what they liked best about their tax research service, respondents said they most prized their service's comprehensiveness and breadth of material (see Exhibit 2). Here, users of CCH were most likely to consider this the service's top virtue (51%), followed closely by RIA and BNA at 48% and 47%, respectively (see Exhibit 3). A significant number of users of all products liked quality of content best. Intuit users were far less likely to pick comprehensiveness as the chief attraction (15%), but they were much more likely than users of the other services to be drawn by its price. Thirty percent of Intuit users ranked that aspect highest, followed by 9% of CCH users; 7% of BNA users; and 5% of RIA users. Intuit users also were more likely than others to say its integration with other software was its strongest point (17% versus between 2 % and 3% for the other three). When we asked what feature about their tax preparation software respondents liked best, users of UltraTax CS (a Thomson Reuters product) were the ones most likely (4.7%) to say that integration with other software was what they liked best about their tax research service. Lacerte, an Intuit product, was second at 2.5%; and ProSystem fx (a CCH product) came in at 2%. Users of Intuit's research service were somewhat more likely to rank ease of finding answers as its top quality (19 %). RIA was a close second in ease of finding answers, with 17% of users saying that was its best feature. Only relatively few users said having a variety of content delivery options and news coverage were what they liked best. Lack of "ease of finding answers" was the greatest dislike for users of all platforms (see Exhibit 4). Well over half of CCH users named that attribute their least liked, with the other three vendors not far behind. This is somewhat paradoxical, since a significant percentage of users of all four services, including 19% of Intuit users and 17% of RIA users, also named this the attribute they liked best (compare Exhibit 3 and Exhibit 5). [GRAPHIC 1 OMITTED] [GRAPHIC 2 OMITTED] This split indicates that ease of finding answers may be the feature of tax research software that users care most about. …