The COVID Project is a free public reference. Its records are public documents, its analyses are its own work, and both are here to be read, cited and reused. Using the site means accepting the few terms below.
What the site is
The COVID Project is an informational reference on the governmental orders of March 2020 through September 2021 and on the Employee Retention Credit's governmental-orders test. It publishes a library of public instruments, reads the statute and the public record, and offers tools that assemble what is in the library for a State, a metro, an industry and a set of quarters. It sells nothing and is not affiliated with any government agency.
Not legal advice
Nothing on this site is legal, tax or accounting advice, and nothing here is advice about any particular employer's claim. Reading the site, using its tools or downloading a report creates no professional relationship with anyone. The tools show what the Library holds for the choices you make; they do not determine anyone's eligibility for the credit. For advice about your own claim, talk to a professional who knows your facts.
The attorney referral
The attorney referral form is an introduction, not a recommendation of counsel and not legal advice. With your authorization, the Project passes the details you give to Civil Counsel Group LLP or to another experienced tax practitioner, who contacts you directly and decides with you whether to take the matter. Any engagement, its terms and its fees are between you and that firm or practitioner; the Project is not a party to it, charges you nothing for the introduction, and is not responsible for the advice or the services you receive. No attorney-client relationship exists with anyone until you engage an attorney. The privacy page says what the form stores and how to withdraw the authorization.
Public-record sources
The instruments in the Library are governmental orders, statutes, rules and court orders, the published notices of trade organizers, published legal authorities and public court filings, each retrieved from the authority that issued it or from a public archive of that authority's page and shown with its source. The methodology page describes how each was retrieved, verified and graded. Only instruments graded Primary source read or Confirmed from a secondary source are shown.
Accuracy, counts and corrections
The Project takes care with every record and checks every correction against the instrument's own text, but a record can hold an error, an instrument can have been amended after the record was made, and a source link can move. Every count on the site is a count of what the Project has retrieved and indexed, never a count of every order that existed; every figure is a floor. Where this site and the instrument's official text differ, the official text governs. Report an error through the contact page, naming the exhibit identifier.
What you may copy, and how to credit it
The Project's original text (the descriptions, indexes, summaries, analyses, page text and the reports its tools assemble) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, share and adapt it for any purpose, including commercially, on one condition: give credit to The COVID Project, with a link to the page you used where a link is possible, and say so if you changed the text. A form that works: "Source: The COVID Project, covidproject.com/quarters/2021Q3 (CC BY 4.0)."
The governmental instruments themselves are public documents. Works of the United States Government are in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105; State and local orders, statutes and rules are public records published here as such. The organizers' notices, the published legal authorities and the court filings are reproduced as public documents for reference, and their authors keep whatever rights they hold in them. The Project claims no rights in any of these; its license covers only its own text.
The site's name and wordmark identify the Project. Do not present your own work as The COVID Project's, or suggest that the Project endorses a claim, a filing or a service.
Using the site and its API
The pages, the exhibit files and the JSON API are free to use. Ordinary use, including reading, searching, downloading exhibits and building on the API at a reasonable rate, needs no permission. Do not send automated traffic at a rate that degrades the site for others, attempt to gain access to anything the site does not serve, or use the contact form to send unsolicited commercial messages.
No warranty
The site and everything on it are provided as they are and as available, without any warranty of any kind: not of accuracy, completeness, currency or fitness for a particular purpose. The Project does not promise that the site will always be available or free of faults.
Limits of responsibility
To the fullest extent the law allows, the Project and the people who build and maintain it are not liable for any loss or damage that comes from reading or relying on the site, from using its tools or reports, from following a link away from it, or from being unable to reach it. Your use of the site is at your own judgment.
Outside sites
Source links, archived copies and citations lead to sites the Project does not control: governments' sites, the Internet Archive, courts' dockets, organizers' pages. Each keeps its own terms and its own privacy practices.
Changes
If these terms change, the new text appears here with a new effective date. Continuing to use the site after a change means accepting the changed terms. Questions go to the contact page.