FTA Standards Development Activities

For over two decades, the Federation of Tax Administrators has been active in fostering common and standard state revenue department approaches to implementing tax administration.

These efforts have taken these forms:

• general monitoring of and reporting on state progress on electronic commerce initiatives including electronic fund transfer (EFT), joint Fed-State filing, web filing, electronic data interchange (EDI), 2-D barcoding, tax jurisdiction sourcing, integrated tax systems, and substitute forms development;
• direct participation in national and industry standards-setting activities encompassing cooperation with other organizations involved in EC.

The latter has included bodies such as the Internal Revenue Service, the National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA), the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the National Association of Computerized Tax Processors (NACTP), the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), and many others.

The web pages in the Technology/E-File portion of the FTA website feature information on these and other areas of FTA's activities.

Throughout all of these efforts, our role is not to prescribe state practices, but rather to encourage compliance withe- standards agreed uponwith industry and IRS, and facilitate the agencies' effort in working together to solve common problems.

• eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based E-file
• Electronic fund transfer (EFT)
• Joint Fed-State E-file
• State web filing
• Electronic data interchange (EDI)
• Telefiling
• 2-D Barcoding of tax forms
• Integrated tax systems
• Substitute (computer-generated) tax forms

For further information, contact

Jonathan Lyon, FTA
jonathan.lyon@taxadmin.org

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