A college friend corrected JD Choi’s English pronunciation. Years later, when Choi took stock of the company he had helped build, that friend still belonged in the accounting. So did an accounting-firm partner who taught him international tax, a colleague who supplied an early assignment, and the people who agreed to work with him before there was much certainty to go around.
In his farewell to 2023, Choi described arriving in the United States unwillingly, four decades earlier. The recollection was brief. He spent more space acknowledging the people who helped him afterward. His version of a founder’s retrospective reads like a list of obligations gratefully remembered. Even the first big development opportunity appears as an act of confidence: a tax executive at a pharmaceutical company trusted the young business with a tax-planning project.
He also acknowledged that some early work had failed. The admission gives the celebration some weight. He had left an accounting firm in January 2000 to start Tax Technologies. Almost 24 years later, he credited repeated improvements, clients, employees and families. The story allows room for competence acquired through other people, and for work that needed doing again.
“In the early years, we were not always successful.”
JD Choi · December 2023
Two practitioners leave the firm
Choi came to software through tax work. He earned a B.B.A. in accounting at the University of Texas at Arlington and a J.D. at New York Law School. Before forming TTI, he worked in international tax consulting at major accounting firms, alongside software-development and process-improvement projects for multinational businesses. He had experience of both the rules and the difficulty of making software carry them.
Biren Patel knew that world too. The two worked together in international tax at Arthur Andersen and Deloitte before co-founding Tax Technologies in 2000. Choi became president and CEO; Patel became vice president and COO. Their shared professional history matters. This was a business started by people who had already worked together on the underlying problem.
The problem Choi identified was fragmentation. Tax tools could perform individual jobs while leaving the department to join everything together. His responsibility at TTI became the development vision for Tax Series, a corporate tax application designed to connect those jobs. The company describes its growth as organic. It also says it began without third-party funding and has had no ownership changes. That is a long period of returning to the same unfinished assignment.
with Biren Patel
partnership announced
taxation beyond Earth
The little workbook that becomes everybody’s problem
Choi’s writing on spreadsheets begins with a concession that makes his criticism more interesting: tax professionals have sound reasons for using them. A specialist can put a complicated calculation into a workbook when needed. Explaining every condition and exception to a software team takes time. The spreadsheet lets the person who understands the rule get on with the calculation.
His concern is the bill that arrives later. In his discussion of end-user computing, he connects scattered workbooks with technical debt: the future cost of expedient decisions made today. A useful file can become another object to maintain, control and reconcile. Multiply the objects, and a department inherits a software estate almost by accident. Excel has a generous manner of accepting new responsibilities.
Read as an argument about work, Choi’s position is more specific than a dislike of spreadsheets. He is asking where the calculation lives, who maintains it, and what happens when its output is needed elsewhere. The tool that solves a specialist’s immediate problem may leave the wider organization with another dependency. His software business sits inside that tension between local convenience and shared responsibility.
Give a number somewhere to live
In his writing about the future of tax technology, Choi describes a progression from collecting data to producing usable information and then business intelligence. The ambition extends beyond filling in a return. He argues for calculations that stay consistent through planning, provision, compliance and audit work, with multiple years available inside the same application.
That sequence explains his attachment to a shared database. Planning happens before filing; an audit may revisit a return years afterward. The people and immediate purpose can change while much of the underlying information remains connected. In Choi’s account, rebuilding that information in separate systems creates needless reconciliation and increases the chance that one version will disagree with another.
Tax Series applies that idea across data collection, tax computations, provision reporting and compliance. Its surrounding tools include a legal-entity directory, tax calendar and document management. The breadth has a practical logic: ownership, deadlines and supporting records affect whether a calculation can be used. A number without its context is a rather demanding houseguest. It has arrived, but someone still has to work out where it belongs.
The argument reaches the advisory desk
In July 2018, Alvarez & Marsal Taxand announced a strategic partnership with Tax Technologies. The proposed combination joined advisory expertise with software, automated calculations and centralized tax data. It addressed domestic and multinational companies dealing with complex international tax work after U.S. tax reform.
The announcement described tracking tax attributes across years, running planning scenarios and connecting with existing platforms. Those are useful details because they show what an outside professional-services firm wanted from the relationship. The attraction was the ability to keep calculations, records and analysis connected over time.
For Choi, the partnership places his product argument in the middle of an advisory workflow. A tax adviser needs to explain a result. A software provider needs to preserve the calculation and its inputs. The customer needs both to survive the next question. The 2018 announcement is a dated milestone, rather than a claim about every engagement today, but it captures the kind of work his company was built to support.
An audition with last year’s numbers
TTI’s sales approach gives the integration argument a demanding test. Under its proof-of-concept offer, a prospective client can reproduce a full year of provision work and tax returns before deciding whether to license Tax Series. The company offers this without a vendor fee or an obligation to buy. Known historical work becomes the examination paper.
Its FAQ describes a process lasting two to ten weeks, depending largely on data availability and reconciliation. The team replicates prior-year work, trains users and rolls the data forward. The sequence puts implementation ahead of the licensing decision. It also acknowledges an awkward fact about enterprise software: agreeing to purchase a system and being ready to use it are separate achievements.
There is a modest severity to this kind of audition. A demonstration can proceed on the presenter’s preferred route. A prior-year return comes with established results and people who may remember exactly how awkward they were to produce. Differences need explanations. For a founder whose retrospective included unsuccessful early work, an offer organized around examination has a certain consistency. Confidence is made available for inspection. It is a practical way of making a promise answerable to the work a customer already knows.
TTI’s stated proof-of-concept window, depending on data availability and reconciliation.
The next quarter has a memory
The company’s support model carries the same attention to continuity. TTI assigns a representative who knows a client’s business and licensed products. With the client’s permission, support staff can examine its Tax Series database. Requests are recorded so the team can anticipate recurring work in a later month, quarter or year.
That is a small operational detail with a human consequence: the next conversation can begin further along. A tax department should not have to introduce its recurring problem as though the two have never met. TTI’s teams span the United States and India, with development, testing and client-service work among their functions. The company identifies Gandhinagar as an operating location in India.
Choi’s public account of the company’s growth gives employees considerable credit. His year-end reflection singled out the people supporting clients through increasingly complicated tax issues. The gratitude is consistent with a product built around preserving context. In software, that means keeping information connected. In a service relationship, it means remembering the work and the people who did it.
A tax return with a view of Earth
Choi continues to write about the work rather than leaving his public identity at founder and CEO. In June 2022, he discussed a client’s question about changing information requirements on tax forms. In August 2024, he examined expanded Schedule J reporting. Both pieces return to the same practical concern: a department needs detailed records ready for the next reporting demand.
His July 2026 writing covered new Pillar Two capabilities in Tax Series and preparation for the IRS’s FIRE-to-IRIS transition. In the former, he described connecting global minimum-tax reporting with existing datasets. In the latter, he emphasized the work around a filing-system change: formatting, testing, processes and transmission arrangements. These are product updates, but they also reveal what continues to occupy the founder’s attention.
Then there is his March 2026 essay on space commerce. He asks who should tax profits earned beyond national territory, and compares the problem with businesses operating on international waters. Telecommunications, transportation and data processing appear among the activities he considers. The questions are speculative, and he presents them as questions about future taxing rights.
It is an unexpectedly expansive destination for a career spent making calculations connect. After years of worrying about numbers crossing systems and borders, Choi is considering what happens when commerce leaves the usual map altogether. Even beyond Earth, apparently, someone will want the supporting detail. The old professional habit travels well: before deciding where a number belongs, understand how it got there.