Updated March 29, 2005

Benefits and Application for Membership (pdf)

New State Increases in ASC X12 Membership 3-29-05 NEW

Since 1989, FTA has been a member of the American National Standards Institute's Accredited Standards Committe X12, responsible for Business Data Interchange. This has been a significant boost to our efforts to assist the state tax agencies in creating and maintaining consistency in their e-file efforts, benefiting their taxpayers by enabling those agencies that adopted the standards (and tax software companies supporting them) to more quickly grow their programs.

The TIGERS Standards group, which in the past has spearheaded development of Sales, Withholding, and Motor Fuel Tax EDI programs, and more recently XML standards for the Fed-State Employment e-File program and Streamlined Sales Tax e-File, and now the Fed-State 1120 e-File program, is a component part of the ASC X12 Government Subcommittee.

It is critical that the efforts of TIGERS are informed by as many state viewpoints as possible; without your input, standards cannot be developed that are responsive to your needs.

Now through efforts of the X12 Government Subcommittee Chair, the Data Interchange Standards Association (the administrative arm of ASC X12) has reduced its annual membership cost to just $1500; this covers the registration cost for attendance of three members of your agency for the three annual working sessions of ASC X12 (February, June, and October). Cost for attendance at individual meetings is $845 per person.

If your payment is received by DISA before the next X12 Trimester meeting February 6-11, 2005, you will receive the maximum benefit throughout the year.

Please review the following documents for further information. Included is an application for membership; please consider joining.

Background
In 1979 the American National Standards Committee (ANSI) created an "Accredited Standards Committee" (ASC), denoted "X12", that addresses business-to-business exchange of electronic documents in a standard format.

Since 1988 the FTA, as well as a number of state revenue departments, have become members of ANSI ASC X12 and have assisted in creating a variety of tax-related standard electronic transactions.

TIGERS (Tax Information Group for Ecommerce Requirements Standardization) was formed in October 1994 as a component part of ASC X12 by FTA, the states, the IRS, and business and service provider representatives, initially to provide an overall coordinative body for advice and counsel on government technical implementation of American National Standards Institute (ANSI)-based tax-related electronic data interchange applications.

The TIGERS initiative is modeled on previous successful industry-cooperation models in the petroleum, pharmaceutical, power, and other industry sectors. It began with efforts to model standard transactions in the area of electronic data interchange (EDI), and is now involved in similar initiatives for eXtensible Markup Language (XML).

TIGERS seeks to ensure success by providing a forum for users to regularly meet together and agree upon on "conventions" for the national-standard formatting of electronic business data. For example, it develops agreements on data formats, the names of data items (Name, Address, etc.) and the like within tax-related electronic transmissions for the tax administration industry, and publishes the results of these agreements. This is done with full support of ANSI ASC X12 efforts, and under its umbrella.

Created by voluntary teams of business specialists and technical personnel from varied government and industry participants, the aim is to ensure that these data format and identification agreements are ultimately in agreement with and are vetted through ASC X12, and are widely used and adhered to by governments and businesses which wish to trade together.

The goal is to achieve a great deal of uniformity and consistency in how standard transactions such as tax returns and other transactions are treated within the tax administration community. This significantly lowers the cost to all parties in understanding, documenting, and applying technology, leading to maximum business benefit for every trading partner involved.

Third party service providers such as software companies which can facilitate electronic trade are particularly advantaged, as this enables them to deliver services and products faster and more economically to their customers.