Yes. We cover all states which have income tax withholding, as well as Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

For local taxes, the basic subscription includes all states except Ohio and Pennsylvania (which are covered by generic city and school district formulas). Because these states carry an excessive number of local taxes, they require much more overhead to monitor and update. Since most customers do not require this level of detail for these two states, we offer them as an add-on product. Most customers will only need the generic local tables for Ohio and Pennsylvania, which are included in the base subscription.

For customers who would like just a few specific local tables for either of these states, they may be added and maintained manually by the customer. This options derives from the new TaxControls "Custom Tax" feature, which gives you the ability to add custom tax formulas which augment or modify the subscription tax files. This feature could be used to include a handful of local taxes for Pennsylvania or Ohio, without the addional cost of the "Extended Local Subscription".

TaxControls software handles 'multiversioned' tables at year-end, which means that you can install the new year's tables before January 1, without having to worrying about "jumping the gun" with the new formulas. The software automatically chooses the correct tax version based on pay date.

We also offer the ability to "suggest" applicable taxes for withholding, based on ZIP code. This allows you to offer easier setup of new employees in your payroll appication.

With TaxControls, the developer can now include custom tax tables with the application. This gives you complete control over the tables--you can provide additional withholding formulas, or override those from the Tax Update subscription file. These custom tables are not overwritten by new subscription data, and have all the same properties and methods as the "standard" tables included with subscriptions.

A one-year subscription is $4995 (or $1375/quarter or $500/month). This entitles you to royalty-free use of the software and data on all company- or customer-owned PC's. There is a one-time fee of $199 for the required ActiveX, .NET or Java component.

A separate "Level 2" subscription is available which includes all the specific Ohio and Pennsylvania local taxes. These local tables involve thousands of jurisdictions, and much higher overhead for monitoring and updating. Call us at 832-476-8477 for more information on this option.

There are five types:

• 'F' - Federal taxes
• 'S' - State taxes
• 'L' - Local taxes
• 'O' - Other taxes (mostly unemployment and disability)
• 'P' - Private formulas, used internally (e.g., for computing taxable income)

The only real bottleneck which is likely to slow down your component is loading the tables from the file. Once you've created a TaxControls component and loaded the data, you should take care to leave that object "alive". Any property or method which needs the table in order to execute will cause the table to be loaded (such as "TaxAmount", "Version", "Taxes", "Refresh", etc.)

We recommend that you use the "TaxAmount" method rather than the "ComputeTax" method unless absolutely necessary. The "ComputeTax" method loads the tax table from the file on each call, and is intended for environments which require a single function call for calculations.

Here's a sample using Foxpro:

oTaxControl = createobject('taxcontrols.ctax') oTaxControl.DataFilename = 'us.tax' oTaxControl.Earnings = 5000.00 oTaxControl.SelectedTax = 'FIT' ? oTaxControl.TaxAmount

Here's some ASP code:

<% Dim ct ct = GetObject("taxcontrols.ctax") ct.DataFilename = "us.tax" ct.Earnings = 5000 ct.SelectedTax = "FIT" response.write "Federal tax: " & ct.TaxAmount %>

Here's a sample in Visual Basic:

Sub ListTaxes Dim ct as New CTaxControl Dim otax as tax ct.DataFilename = "c:\us.tax" For each otax in ct.Taxes ' skip over 'hidden' taxes: If otax.TaxType <%gt; "P" then Debug.print otax.Name & ", " & otax.TaxType End If Next End Sub