Editorial standards | Simplify Sales Tax

Every factual claim on Simplify Sales Tax traces to a primary source: the Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board, the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement, the CSP Operating Contract, a state department of revenue, a statute, a court opinion, or a written statement from the company a fact is about, where that company is the authority on it. All six certified providers are covered on one template and one set of criteria. Placement and inclusion are not for sale. This site is funded by TaxCloud, one of the six providers it covers.

These are the editorial standards Simplify Sales Tax works to, set out specifically enough that you can check whether we followed them. See About for the funding disclosure itself.

Where every fact comes from

Every claim about the Streamlined Sales Tax program, a member state, or a provider traces to one of the sources named above. If nothing on that list says it, and no company statement of the kind described below covers it, it doesn’t reach the page.
Vendor blogs, review aggregators, and data vendors are leads to chase, never evidence. A claim runs only once a primary source says it too.
A written statement from a provider counts as a source for the one thing that company is the authority on: what it covers and what it charges. It is attributed to that company on the page and it is available to all six providers on the same terms. Where a company’s own published pages still disagree with each other on an open question, we report that. Where the company has settled the question in writing, we publish the settled answer and stop republishing the stale inconsistency, and we say in the log which one we did and when. We use it because a provider’s public pages sometimes contradict each other, and a company is entitled to say which version is right about its own service.
Extracts are cached with the URL and the date retrieved, and a time-sensitive figure carries that date on the page.
Where sources conflict, we report the conflict rather than picking a version quietly. A question that stays open goes on the corrections page by name.
Rates, economic nexus thresholds, and filing deadlines get described as mechanisms, with a link to the agency that publishes the figure. They vary by state and they change.

What reaches the page, and what stays in the research file

We source everything and cite selectively. Those are two different rules, and on Simplify Sales Tax only the first one is absolute. Every claim traces to a cached primary source. What appears in the copy is a budget: at most three outbound links and two quoted fragments per page, spent on a fact you might dispute or act on, like a condition attached to money or a number that decides something. Everything else gets explained in our own words, unless the exact wording is itself the fact, and the verbatim stays in the research file under its URL and date.

Two pages exceed that budget on purpose, where the wording is the fact: the amnesty exclusions, and the criteria that decide who pays your provider.

How a provider profile gets made

The six Streamlined Sales Tax provider profiles are held pending a legal review and are not published yet. What follows is the standard they are built to, and what they are checked against before they publish.

Every profile of a Certified Service Provider is built the same way.

All six certified providers are covered, on one template and one set of criteria, and every profile states real limitations. A profile that states none waits until it does.
Capability and pricing facts come from that provider’s own materials or the Governing Board listing, never from a competitor’s comparison page.
Where a provider publishes no pricing, we write “not published” with the date we checked, and read nothing into it.
Providers correct facts in their own profile, at any time and with no deadline. Assessments, stated limitations, and what gets covered stay ours.
Placement, ranking, and inclusion are off the market. No advertising, no sponsored content, no affiliate revenue, nothing here to buy.

Where we take a position, and where we never will

We reach a verdict on the Streamlined Sales Tax program. We never reach one on a provider. Provider neutrality is absolute: six providers, one template, one set of criteria, and zero promotional mention of any of them, the funder included.

The program itself is a fair question to answer, and where the evidence supports a conclusion we reach it. A seller with nexus in a good number of member states, and no premises, property, or people in them, meets the funded-services criteria in all of them, and for that seller the program is worth joining. A handful of member states, or stock and staff in your biggest ones, and the answer changes. Which provider to hire stays yours.

The funder’s conflict of interest

TaxCloud pays for Simplify Sales Tax and is one of the six providers it covers. Here’s what we do about it.

TaxCloud is covered on the same criteria as the other five, with its limitations stated.
Where TaxCloud’s own published material is unclear, contradicts itself, or is contradicted by a primary source, we report it. Two live examples sit in the correction log: one we removed once TaxCloud settled it in writing, and one still open because it hasn’t been.
State pages carry the six-provider module and name no provider in the body at all. Elsewhere a provider is named only where a sourced fact requires it and at least one other provider is named in the same section, and never in praise.
We count how often each provider is named site wide, and hold TaxCloud’s total within 1.6 times the average of the other five. Every page counts, this one included. Naming the funder is unavoidable on a page about the funding, so those mentions could fairly be excluded, and we don’t exclude them: a measure you adjust in your own favor stops being a measure. It is reported on every run of the site’s own checks.
We also measure how favorably each provider is treated, not just how often it is named, and we hold the funder inside the same 1.6 band in both directions. Both bounds are real: a funded site fails by flattering its funder, and it fails by over-correcting until the correction is the tell. The band is 0.6 to 1.6 either way, it is checked before a provider page ships, and the measurement is reproducible from the site’s own repository.

How a correction works

A correction to Simplify Sales Tax follows the same route whoever raises it. Errors get corrected once confirmed, and every correction is logged on the corrections page with the date, the page, and what changed. Formatting fixes stay out of it, and a fact never changes here silently.

Anyone can challenge a fact on this site: write to corrections@simplifysalestax.com, which reaches the publication rather than its funder. A provider’s challenge gets the same reading as a reader’s.

When we re-verify

Every source behind a Simplify Sales Tax page carries the date it was retrieved, and re-verification runs on a schedule rather than when something looks wrong.

Pricing and provider pages get re-checked quarterly, and again immediately before any change publishes.
Program and state facts get re-checked quarterly against the Governing Board and the relevant state agency.
Definitional and how-to content gets reviewed every six months, unless a source changes first.
Every page carries a visible last-updated date, and it moves only when the substance does.

Who writes it, and how the pages get made

No page here carries an individual byline. Pages are attributed to the publication. That’s a decision rather than a gap: production here is AI-assisted, every page goes through separate review passes for facts, neutrality, and readability, and one person’s name would credit work no one person did. Every version of the claim that a byline improves how an answer engine reads a page traced back to a vendor blog, which this page refuses as evidence anyway. Who writes it has the reasoning.

What these rules cannot fix

Three things to weigh, and nothing above removes any of them.

The funding. The company paying for Simplify Sales Tax is one of the six providers it covers. A funded publication isn’t a neutral one, and these rules constrain the conflict and make it checkable rather than dissolving it.
AI-assisted production. Disclosure buys transparency rather than certainty, so a page you’re about to act on still deserves its primary source.
Provider facts go stale between checks. A profile is as current as the date printed on it and no more, so get a number that decides something from the provider in writing.