Editorial & Corrections Policy

Why this page exists

TaxesLedger publishes figures people use to price goods, reconcile receipts, and prepare filings. Getting one wrong has consequences beyond a bad user experience, so the standards we hold ourselves to should be written down and checkable rather than assumed. This page is that record. It is deliberately specific about our limits — an unsourced claim, a stale rate, and an overstated credential are all failures, and pretending otherwise would be the largest one.

Sourcing standard

Every rate on this site traces to a named authority in our source registry: 51 US state and District revenue departments, the Canada Revenue Agency plus 5 provincial finance ministries, the European Commission's VAT database, the Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board, and research references including the Tax Foundation. The full list, with what each dataset draws on, is published on the Tax Data Sources page.

Three rules govern what gets published:

• Rates live in data, never in prose. Worked examples across the site compute from the same records the calculators use, so a corrected rate propagates everywhere instead of leaving stale numbers embedded in sentences.
• Every factual claim must be sourceable. Rate changes carry effective dates. Thresholds cite the authority that sets them. Where a figure varies by locality and we have not verified the locality, we say the rule rather than inventing the number.
• Thin but true beats long but hollow. If a section cannot be written from verifiable facts about its specific subject, it does not get padded to look substantial.

Verification status — and why some datasets say "needs refresh"

Each dataset carries one of three statuses, published openly rather than kept internal:

• Officially verified — checked against the authority's own current publication, with the review date recorded.
• Imported from internal dataset — sourced and source-linked, compiled from our maintained data rather than re-read from the authority this cycle.
• Needs official refresh — flagged as due for re-verification. The rates are our best current data and the official source is attached, but we will not describe them as verified until they have been re-checked.

No small publisher can honestly claim continuous official verification of every rate across thousands of US jurisdictions. Publishing the status per dataset is how we keep that limitation visible instead of papering over it — and it is why our own pages avoid blanket "verified" badges.

How to report an error

Send it through the contact page using the Tax Rate Update / Correction category. The most useful reports include:

• the URL of the page showing the wrong figure;
• what we display, and what you believe is correct;
• the effective date, if the rate changed recently;
• a link to the official source, if you have one.

You do not need all four to send a report — a URL and "this looks wrong" is genuinely worth sending, and several rate corrections on this site started exactly that way.

What we do with it

1. Acknowledge — we aim to reply within 2 business days.
2. Verify against the authority — not against another calculator site. Aggregators copy each other; the revenue department is the arbiter.
3. Fix at the source record, so every page, example, and calculator that uses the rate updates together. We aim to resolve within 5 business days.
4. Check for the same class of error elsewhere. A single wrong rate is usually a pattern — a district rate recorded as a citywide rate, say — so a confirmed report triggers a sweep of comparable records rather than a one-line edit.
5. Say so. Material corrections to a published figure are noted on the affected page's update date, and the dataset's review date is bumped.

Credentials, and what we do not claim

TaxesLedger is built and fact-checked against official sources by M. Imtinan Farooq, a data engineer specializing in financial data systems and multi-state US sales tax modelling. He is not a CPA, an enrolled agent, or a tax attorney, and the site does not describe him as one. Attribution across the site reads "data methodology reviewed by" precisely because that is the accurate description of the work.

Nothing here is tax, accounting, or legal advice. Our calculators and reference pages are built to help you understand and check a number — for a filing decision, use a credentialed professional or your revenue department directly.

Independence and advertising

The site is free and ad-supported through Google AdSense, which serves advertising automatically. Advertisers have no input into our rates, our rankings, our guides, or which tools we build. There are no sponsored pages, no paid placements, and no affiliate arrangements influencing what we publish or how we rank anything.

Corrections we have already made

As a matter of record, recent corrections have included city rates where a special improvement-district rate had been recorded as the citywide rate (Fayetteville, AR; Overland Park, KS), a city listed with a local tax it does not levy (Wichita, KS), and municipal rates omitted entirely (Morgantown and Wheeling, WV). Each was fixed at the source record and triggered a sweep for the same error class across other cities. We publish this because a corrections policy with no corrections in it is a claim, not a record.

Frequently asked questions

Quick answers to the most common questions users ask.