IRS & LII

Did you know that irs.gov, the official website of the Internal Revenue Service, points visitors to our website? In fact, so far in 2023 it trails only the major search engines, social media platforms, and wikipedia for the number of visitors it has sent to law.cornell.edu.

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when all of the traffic referred by irs.gov was to our US Code collection, and that traffic made up almost 5% of visitors to that collection. While the IRS still points to our US Code, there is much more. In fact, only 5 of the top 10 pages on our website for receiving traffic from irs.gov are U.S. Code sections. Four others are in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR).

Most exciting, though, is the top page on law.cornell.edu to receive traffic from irs.gov:  this one. That is the statutory definition of “recovery startup business,” as extracted from 26 U.S. Code Section 3134(c)(5) by an automated technique we first developed more than a decade ago. And this seems to be the IRS webpage that points there. 

While it’s always gratifying to see anyone (and especially government agencies) point to our website to help information seekers find what they are looking for, it’s especially exciting to see our Definitions Feature gaining traction with the outside world. (We’ve long watched with satisfaction as an increased number of visitors each year have clicked on the machine-extracted definitions while reading our U.S. Code and CFR collections.) Part of that excitement stems from our current focus on expanding the Definitions Feature to our newest major collection–state regulations. When we get that up and running, you’ll definitely read about it here!