(1) TAX DOCUMENTS

Tax documents are forms and statements issued to a taxpayer by a third party that contain information used in the completion of the taxpayer's income tax return.

One physical tax document may contain more than one logical tax form or statement. For example, a broker may issue a consolidated tax statement that contains Forms 1099-B, 1099-DIV, 1099-INT, 1099-OID, and 1099-MISC.

FORMS

Common forms issued by third parties include:

Form W-2, Wage and Tax Statement, issued to taxpayer by an employer
Form 1099-B, Proceeds From Broker Transactions, issued to taxpayer by a stock broker

STATEMENTS

Statements issued by third parties include:

Statement of rental income and expenses issued to taxpayer by a property manager

(2) PDF

The most common file format for downloadable tax documents. Such tax documents can be viewed using any application that can display PDF files. The most commonly used PDF viewer application is Adobe Acrobat Reader DC available at get.adobe.com/reader/.

Ordinary tax documents in PDF format are readable by humans. But they require either (1) manual data entry or (2) complex, costly-to-develop, and less-than-reliable parsing software to insert into tax software.

Intelligent tax documents^® use a technology that is relatively simple to implement and highly reliable.

(3) JSON

A widely-used standard for data representation. Modern computer applications can readily consume data in JSON format.

Here is an example of JSON included in an intelligent tax document^®:

{
  "forms" : [ {
    "taxW2" : {
      "taxYear" : 2022,
      "taxFormDate" : "2021-03-30",
      "taxFormType" : "TaxW2",
      "employeeTin" : "XXX-XX-1234",
      "employerTin" : "12-3456789",
      "employerNameAddress" : {
        "line1" : "12021 Sunset Valley Dr",
        "line2" : "Suite 230",
        "city" : "Preston",
        "state" : "VA",
        "postalCode" : "20191",
        "name1" : "Tax Form Issuer, Inc"
      },
      "controlNumber" : "012547 WY/OA7",
      "employeeName" : {
        "first" : "Kris",
        "middle" : "Q",
        "last" : "Public"
      },
      "employeeAddress" : {
        "line1" : "1 Main St",
        "city" : "Melrose",
        "state" : "NY",
        "postalCode" : "12121"
      },
      "wages" : 44416.74,
      "federalTaxWithheld" : 6907.16,
      "socialSecurityWages" : 47162.92,
      "socialSecurityTaxWithheld" : 2924.1,
      "medicareWages" : 47162.92,
      "medicareTaxWithheld" : 683.86,
      "codes" : [ {
        "code" : "C",
        "amount" : 301.5
      }, {
        "code" : "D",
        "amount" : 2746.18
      }, {
        "code" : "DD",
        "amount" : 4781.88
      } ],
      "retirementPlan" : true,
      "stateTaxWithholding" : [ {
        "stateTaxWithheld" : 1726.78,
        "state" : "OH",
        "stateTaxId" : "OH 036-133505158F-01",
        "stateIncome" : 44416.74
      } ],
      "localTaxWithholding" : [ {
        "localTaxWithheld" : 427.62,
        "localityName" : "Kirtland",
        "state" : "OH",
        "localIncome" : 44416.74
      } ]
    }
  } ]
}

(4) PDF DOCUMENT PROPERTIES

PDF files may contain internal information known as document properties. Document properties are text values. A unique name is associated with each value.