taxsimtest.ado is a Stata program for calculating US and State income tax liabilities from user supplied data. It does not do the calculation in Stata, or on the user's computer. Rather, it packages up the data and sends it to the taxsim server at the NBER office in Cambridge for processing, then loads the results into a Stata format dataset on the user's computer. The process is fast enough to be interactive for modest sized datasets, and will work for large files also. The program takes into account up to 35 income, deduction and personal characteristics in the calculation of taxes.
First, be very familiar with Internet
Taxsim before using the Stata interface. Install the .ado with
these Stata commands:
. net from "https://taxsim.nber.org/stata"
. net describe taxsimtest
. net install taxsimtest
Be sure to read the instructions:
By default -taxsimtest.ado- uses the ssh protocol for communicating with our server. It will try port 443 if port 22 is blocked. If ssh is not available on your computer (such as Windows versions before Autumn 2019) or blocked by a firewall, it is possible that the "ftp" option will help. There is also an "http" option but that may not work with large files.
There is also available a taxsim .ado that does all the computation locally on your computer. It is especially useful for very large datasets (millions of records) or highly confidential data.
Daniel Feenberg
617-682-6204
feenberg@nber.org