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April 22, 2008

ARTS Announces International XML Standard for Tax Management

For Immediate Release
Contact: Kathy Grannis or Ellen Davis (202) 783-7971
grannisk@nrf.com or davise@nrf.com

ARTS Announces International XML Standard for Tax Management

Washington, April 22, 2008 – Retailer costs associated with calculation, collection, reporting and remission of local and national transaction taxes are estimated at several billion dollars annually and multinational retailers face staggering complexity at the point of sale. The Association for Retail Technology Standards, a division of the National Retail Federation, is helping retailers navigate these challenges with the new Transaction Tax Schema.

ARTS today announced the release of this new standard that will link information from transaction tax providers to a retailer’s POS system. The benefits will be harmonization of the download and publication of transaction tax rules to a retailer’s POS and/or tax calculation systems, improved accuracy of tax liability calculations and streamlined communication between the POS and tax calculation systems.

“This standard will help retailers by reducing the cost and difficulty associated with tax management,” said Richard Mader, Executive Director of ARTS. “We specifically targeted this work to greatly or even eliminate the effort associated with sales tax audits and we strongly believe the work team succeeded.”

The new standard was developed by a diverse ARTS work team which included retailers such as BJ’s Wholesale Club, El Cortes Inglés and Reebok, and suppliers such as ADP Taxware, ARS eCommerce, Clicks & Mortar, Micros Retail, NSB, Oracle, Retail Anywhere and Vertex.

“Retailers have long been challenged with meeting the requirements of national, state and local tax authorities,” said Scott Gamel, chair of the Transaction Tax work team and Sr. Associate, Tax Compliance at ADP Taxware. “An ARTS standard that connects retailers’ POS and ERP systems to transaction tax software through XML messaging will go a long way toward making their lives easier.”

ARTS Board Member and work team contributor Perry Kramer, VP, Sales Operations, Corporate and Logistics Solutions at BJ’s Wholesale Club, agreed. “Multiple compliance burdens, placed upon large transaction tax remitters like retailers, will be simplified by this robust standard,” he said. “Additionally, the standard will dramatically enhance retailers’ ability to quickly and accurately react to the ever-changing complexity of overlapping tax jurisdictions and of cross jurisdictional sale and return transactions.”

The standard is specified in XML, the data language of the internet. Anyone involved in the retail business that operates in multiple tax jurisdictions will benefit from this specification. Transaction Tax offers seamless integration with other ARTS standards such as POSlog and Price and as well as other global standards such as GS1.

The Association for Retail Technology Standards is an international membership organization dedicated to reducing the costs of technology through standards. Since 1993, ARTS has been delivering application standards exclusively to the retail industry. ARTS has four standards: The Standard Relational Data Model, UnifiedPOS, ARTS XML and Standard Requests for Proposal. Membership is open to all members of the international technology community- retailers from all industry segments, application developers and hardware companies. www.nrf-arts.org.

The National Retail Federation is the world's largest retail trade association, with membership that comprises all retail formats and channels of distribution including department, specialty, discount, catalog, Internet, independent stores, chain restaurants, drug stores and grocery stores as well as the industry's key trading partners of retail goods and services. NRF represents an industry with more than 1.6 million U.S. retail companies, more than 25 million employees - about one in five American workers - and 2007 sales of $4.5 trillion. As the industry umbrella group, NRF also represents over 100 state, national and international retail associations. www.nrf.com

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