Research Methodology

What was actually opened

Statutes were read on the Legal Information Institute U.S. Code pages and, where a cross-check was needed, on uscode.house.gov. The LII §168 page opened on October 16, 2026, already reflected the 2025 amendments, including §168(n) and the amended §168(k). The enacted text of Public Law 119-21 was read from the slip-law PDF on congress.gov, sections 70301, 70306, and 70307.

Treasury regulations were read on eCFR or LII’s eCFR mirror, including §§1.48-1, 1.263(a)-1, 1.263(a)-3, 1.162-3, 1.167(a)-11, 1.168(i)-8, and 1.168(k)-2. When an eCFR page blocked automated retrieval, the library used the LII mirror and recorded that limit. Regulations are not paraphrased from blog summaries.

IRS documents were read as PDFs or HTML on irs.gov: Publication 5653 (February 2025), Publication 946 (2025), Publication 527 (2025), Notice 2026-11, Notice 2026-16, Rev. Proc. 2025-32, Rev. Proc. 2025-23, Rev. Proc. 2026-32, Rev. Proc. 2015-13, Rev. Proc. 2020-25, Action on Decision 1999-008, and the Form 4562 and Form 3115 instructions. Court opinions were read on official court sites, CourtListener, Justia, Leagle, OpenJurist, or another reporter page that was actually opened. A caption copied from a marketing site is not a source.

Those are the methods. This page does not claim that every sentence on every opinion was line-audited in a later pass. The research register records VERIFIED, PARTIAL, and held rows so a reader can see the difference. PARTIAL means the citation was confirmed, often through Publication 5653 or an IRS written determination, but the opinion text itself was not fully opened. Held means the inventory URL stays empty.

Source tiers

Tier 1 — statutes, Treasury regulations, and court opinions from official or confirmed reporters. A Tier 1 source decides what the law is. Hospital Corporation of America, Whiteco, Scott Paper, Idaho Power, and the Code sections listed on the tax-code index sit here.

Tier 2 — IRS revenue rulings, procedures, notices, publications, and form instructions, plus the Cost Segregation Audit Techniques Guide as examiner guidance that is not law. Publication 5653 is the most-used Tier 2 document in this library. It is also the document most often mistaken for a statute. The guide’s own disclaimer forbids that use. After July 4, 2025, the guide is also late on bonus depreciation.

Tier 3 — engineering and construction references used only to describe building systems or estimating methods. A unit-cost book can explain how an estimator prices a fixture. It cannot assign a recovery period. The Audit Techniques Guide’s mention of published cost data is a study-method comment, not an incorporation of any manual into the Internal Revenue Code.

Tier 4 — other firms’ websites, used only to see which topics readers expect. No text, structure, tables, or images are copied, and they are not cited as authority. Topic discovery is not research confirmation. A competitor page that lists “typical” reclassification percentages is not a source for any CostSeg SI sentence.

Claim records, grades, and time-sensitive facts

High-risk claims — a tax rule, a date, a dollar limit, a case holding, or a classification — get a register row with the claim in plain words, the authority, the primary URL that was opened, a pinpoint only when confirmed, the publication or decision date, the effective date when the rule is time-sensitive, a paraphrase of what the source establishes, the limits, the pages that rely on it, and the verification status. That record is internal research discipline. This page restates it so a reader knows why an as-of date appears on a bonus-depreciation sentence.

VERIFIED means the citation, court or issuer, and date were confirmed on a source page that was opened. PARTIAL means some fields were confirmed and the article must say which ones. UNVERIFIED must not appear as fact. NOT RELEVANT means a real authority was found but it does not support cost-segregation content. NOT FOUND means no matching primary source was located. Held inventory URLs are the public face of NOT FOUND or NOT RELEVANT captions that were still in the 187-URL list.

Bonus percentages, acquisition cutoffs, §179 limits, and automatic-change lists carry an as-of date. An older article is never treated as proof of current law. Publication 5653 revised in February 2025 does not prove the July 2025 statute. Form 3115 instructions revised in December 2022 do not prove the 2025 designated-change-number list.

What this method does not include

It does not include peer review. No academic journal, bar committee, or unnamed “research board” reviewed these pages. No qualified tax or legal reviewer has been named. Source-checking against LII, irs.gov, and opened opinions can reach a verified grade. It cannot be called professionally reviewed. The publication record on every article still reads expertReview: not-reviewed. Search indexing does not wait for that signature. The pages are in the sitemap as educational material.

It does not include real client files. No real client data, names, or savings are approved for publication. Every case-study URL is a hypothetical illustration and says so. Invented testimonials and invented reclassification percentages are outside the method because they have no source.

It does not include Super Intelligence as a researcher. Proposed workflow screens that use that vocabulary are explanatory. They did not open PDFs, grade sources, or write these pages. A reader should not treat an agent label as a citation.

Classifications are written as fact-dependent. A sentence such as “carpet is usually five-year property” is not used as a nationwide rule. The page cites the regulation, the Rev. Proc. 87-56 class, or the Audit Techniques Guide matrix that supports the statement and states what facts could change the result. Applying a restaurant matrix row to an office must be labeled an analogy.