Tax Policy Research Guide

The IRS is a bureau of the Treasury Department. It administers, enforces, and supervises the execution and application of the internal revenue laws and collects taxes through administrative procedures. The IRS publishes a wide variety of tax statistics.

The Treasury Department develops and impements tax policies and programs; provides the official estimates of all governments receipts for the President's budget, fiscal policy decisions, and Treasury cash management decisions; establishes policy criteria reflected in regulations and rulings, and guides preparation of them with the Internal Revenue Service; and provides economic and legal policy analysis for domestic and international tax policy decisions. The Office of Tax Policy includes reports, tax analysis, and annual reports to Congress on the Administration's revenue proposals ("Greenbook").

The Council of Economic Advisers, an agency within the Executive Office of the President, is charged with providing the President objective economic advice on the formulation of both domestic and international economic policy. The Council bases its recommendations and analysis on economic research and empirical evidence.

The National Economic Council (NEC) was established in 1993 to advise the President on U.S. and global economic policy.

The Committee on Ways & Means is the chief tax-writing committee in the House of Representatives.

The Senate Committee on Finance is the Senate committee concerned with taxation and other revenue measures.

The Joint Committee on Taxation is a non-partisan committee of the United States Congress. The staff of the Joint Committee assists Congressional tax-writing committees with the development and analysis of legislative proposals, prepares official revenue estimates of all tax legislation considered by Congress, drafts legislative histories for tax-related bills, and investigates various aspects of the federal tax system. Their website contains numerous publications, including revenue-related analyses of the President's budget proposals, macroeconomic analyses of tax bills, and the annual "Bluebook," an explanation of each year's new tax legislation. For more on Bluebooks, see Joint Committee on Taxation - Bluebooks on our Tax Research - Federal Guide.

The charge of the CBO is to produce a cost benefit analysis of legislation introduced in Congress. This site includes background papers, economic analyses, cost benefit reports, and other analytical studies prepared by the CBO. The publications cover an extensive range of subject areas, including the environment, labor, homeland security, federal spending, and much more.

All unclassified reports produced by the GAO are available to the public. The entire range of government activities are reviewed by the GAO and these reports provide factual and thorough anaylsis of government projects. Older GAO reports are available onFDSys (1989- ) and Westlaw (GAO-RPTS, coverage begins in 1994).

With tab at the top of the page, you can access GAO Reports which contains reports ("blue books") on audits, surveys, investigations, and evaluations of federal programs conducted by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Every C-SPAN program since 1987 is available and searchable in this extensive archive of the C-SPAN network, providing access to hours of policy debates and transcripts.

Includes economic research and downloadable data related to selected Federal Reserve Board statistical releases

ProQuest Congressional provides CRS reports from 1916 to the present. It is one of the best, most comprehensive single sources for locating and searching through CRS Reports. (Use the Advanced Search page and uncheck everything except CRS Reports under Content Types on the left.)

Congress.gov provides public access to reports and other products created by Congressional Research Service. CRS routinely updates reports on their site, designed to reflect new developments and the needs of Congress. This is the official site for CRS Reports.

HeinOnline provides scanned versions of older CRS Reports from 1999 to the present. CRS reports are listed alphabetically.

EveryCRSReport.com provides free access to its collection of CRS reports and also includes archived reports from University of North Texas's CRS Report collection. You can Browse by Topic using the option below the search bar.

Provides CRS reports as they are delivered from 2005 to the present. All reports link to the PDF version provided by CRS.

The online hub for all of the CQ Press products, including CQ Researcher, CQ Weekly (CQ Magazine), Sage Stats (formerly CQ Press State Stats), CQ Political Reference Suite.

A database of in-depth, authoritative reports on a full range of political and social-policy issues extending back to 1923. Each report is footnoted and includes an overview, background section, chronology, bibliography and debate-style pro-con feature, plus tools to study the evolution of the topic over time.

A weekly news magazine featuring in-depth reporting on public policy, politics, congressional legislation, and elections extending back to 1983, including: a complete wrap-up of news on Congress, the status of bills in play, behind-the-scenes maneuvering, committee and floor activity, debates, and all roll-call votes.