The complete file is about 960 kb in size - which translates into about 500 letter size pages (single spaced.)

I found the file when I was surfing to a variety of web pages that I check each month to keep up with the tax laws. A cross link led me to the http://gop.house.gov/ web site where I found a copy of the House bill for The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 - which I promptly downloaded. A few hours later, I went back to the same web page and there was a link to the Statement of the Manager's explanation of the bill that had just been approved by the Joint Committee that reconciles differences between the tax bills in the House and the Senate. (I'm explaining some of this stuff for the benefit of some viewers who might not be familiar with the tax legislative process - so I apologise to the tax professionals who are reading this and ask that you bear with me for the benefit of those who aren't already familiar with these matters.)

Anyway, when a new tax bill is produced, there are three separate versions of the bill. The first is the one passed by the House. The second is an amended version of the House bill that is passed by the Senate. In most large tax bills, the differences are substantial, so a Joint Committee meets to resolve the differences and that third bill is then sent to the President for signature.

The Statement of the Mangers is the document prepared by the staff of the Joint Committee to explain the two different versions of the same tax bill and to compare it to existing law - often with some historic perspective. It's the most useful explanation of the law because it's not written in terms of the specific code sections and sub-sections that are being added, deleted or amended. It's often a very readable document and usually provides excellent background on the pending legislation.

Whenever a new tax law is passed, I rely more on the Statement of the Managers than on the actual bill - until I have a need for some very detailed analysis of a particular part of the new law.

So ... this set of web pages is not a copy of the new law. It's an explanation of the new law, with a comparison between current law, the House bill and the Senate bill.

There are about 45 pages in this web site that include portions of the Statement of the Managers. (Each "page" may range from one to many printed pages.) There are about 500 pages if you print out all of these web pages.

The total size of the document I downloaded from the government web site was about 960 kb. This is a nearly impossible size document to work with so I broke it down into the twenty separate sections of the bill. Some of those documents were more than 100 kb in size so I separated some of them into separate web pages for each sub-section. I then created a master index with links to the separate documents and with links back to the index page.

The document I downloaded included extensive underlining of various levels of headings - but they are not cross links. I left them in black, so any black text that is underlined will not take you to another document. I used light blue (the standard color) for hyper-links. You can tell the difference by whether the phrase is underlined - and the large sub-titles usually are not. When you click on a link and then go to any page that includes that link, it should thereafter show up as in red, underlined.

My version of Netscape (3.0) didn't translate the "xxx" quote marks in the original copy and converted them into Axxx@. I've tried to correct them with a search for that charactor, but it's possible I might have missed a few. In addition, the apostrophe (') was translated into an equal sign (=) by Netscape and I might have missed some them as well.

Vernon K. Jacobs, CPA

About the author:

Vernon Jacobs is a CPA who works as a tax author and consultant.