Corrections policy

Reporting an error

Email [email protected]. Reports about any of the five member sites go to the same address, and it reaches the person who maintains the code.

Each member site also publishes its own corrections page with a country-specific reporting address — AusTax Tools, CA Tax Tools, NZ Tax Tools, UK Tax Tools, US Tax Tools. Either route reaches the same maintainer; use whichever is closer to the page you are reporting.

Four things make a report actionable, and a report is worth sending even with only some of them:

• The page URL — including the country site, since several sites have calculators of the same name.
• The inputs you used — the figures you typed, the tax year, and any option you selected.
• The output you got — the number the page produced.
• What you expected, and why — ideally the tax authority's page, notice or worked example that gives a different answer. This is the part that turns a disagreement into a fix, because it is what gets checked first.

You do not need to be certain, and you do not need to be a professional. A message saying only "this figure looks wrong to me and here is the government page I was reading" is a good report.

What happens next

1. Reproduce. The reported inputs are run through the live page to confirm the output. If it cannot be reproduced you will be told that rather than left waiting.
2. Verify against the official source. The disputed rule is re-read at the tax authority, not resolved by argument or by consulting how another calculator behaves. This step decides the outcome, so it is never skipped even when the error is obvious.
3. Fix, with a test. A confirmed error becomes an automated test asserting the correct answer, and then the fix that makes it pass. The test is why the same defect cannot return unnoticed later.
4. Sweep for the same error elsewhere. A wrong figure is rarely in one place — it also tends to sit in an article, a summary, or an equivalent calculator on another site. The fix is not finished until the value has been searched for across the network.
5. Publish and reply. The correction goes live and the person who reported it is told what was found, including in the case where the original figure turned out to be right.

What is committed to

• Material corrections are noted on the page, not made silently. Where a published figure or result was wrong in a way that could have changed a reader's decision, the page says that it was corrected and when. Typos, wording and layout are fixed without a note.
• Verified errors are fixed within three working days. Where a figure is materially wrong the page is corrected immediately and, if a fix will take longer, the affected result carries a warning in the meantime rather than continuing to present a number we know to be wrong.
• Every substantive page shows when it was last reviewed. The date is derived from the page's own change history rather than being set by hand, so it cannot be inflated by a site-wide rebuild.
• Reports are answered. Including the ones that turn out to be mistaken — those are usually a sign that a page explained something badly, which is itself worth fixing.

What this policy is not

This is a policy about the accuracy of published calculations and guidance. It is not a channel for advice about your own tax position: a report that a calculator disagrees with your accountant is welcome and will be checked, but the reply will be about the calculator, not about your return. The network is not a registered tax agent in any of its five countries and does not give personal tax advice — see about the publisher.

The standards this policy backs up are set out on the standards page, and the testing practice that is meant to catch errors before you do is on the accuracy page.