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Tax Statutes and Regulations

Internal Revenue Code

Available in various places, including HeinOnline, Lexis+, Westlaw, Bloomberg Law, including specific tax databases, and Checkpoint. Remember that the Code is just a statute; you can find it anywhere you can find federal statutes.

Treasury Regulations

Regulations are issued by the Treasury Department. They are codified in Title 26 of the Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.), which is updated annually on April 1. Note that while the regulations do track U.S.C. numbering, it’s much more complicated than matching the title and section number.

The most commonly-used parts of Title 26 of the C.F.R. are

1

Income Tax

20

Estate Tax

25

Gift Tax

29

Generation-Skipping Tax

31

Employment Tax

301

Procedure & Administration

601

Commissioner's Rules

 

A Note on Citations

Treasury Regulations are not cited to the C.F.R., unlike other federal regulations. They are cited as Treasury Regulations, for example, Treas. Reg. § 20.7520-2(b)(3). See Table 1 of the Bluebook for more information.

Most Treasury Regulations use a specific numbering system. They are codified in Title 26 of the C.F.R., although that does not appear in the citation. The number before the decimal point, in this example, 20, indicated the corresponding part of the C.F.R., so Title 26, part 20. The number after the decimal point indicates that the regulation pertains to Internal Revenue Code § 7520, and 2(b)(3) is the specific subsection of the regulation.

A Treasury Regulation may have a subsection -0. This subsection is often a table of contents or an introduction to a series of related regulations.

Related regulations

Regulations for a section of the Code may appear in more than one part of Title 26 of the C.F.R.

Treasury Decision Numbers

A Treasury Regulation also has a Treasury Decision (T.D.) number. This number is chronologically-assigned. Specialized tax databases may use the T.D. number rather than the Treasury Regulation citation.

Regulations are published in the Federal Register and the C.F.R., which you can access in the usual places, (Bloomberg, Hein, Lexis, Westlaw, eCFR, etc.). Recent (since 1994) electronic Federal Register is available from FederalRegister.gov.