D.C. Mun. Regs. tit. 9, r. 9-475
Gross receipts from the sale or charges for information services shall be subject to the sales tax. For the purpose of this section, the term "information services" includes furnishing general or specialized news or current information by printed, mimeographed, electronic, or electrical transmission, or by utilizing wires, cables, radio waves, microwaves, satellites, fiber optics, or any other method now in existence or which may be devised, and electronic data retrieval or research.
Information which is gathered, maintained, or compiled and made available by the provider of the information service to the public or to a specific segment of industry for a consideration shall be subject to sales tax.
Information services, whether sold by subscription or on an as-needed basis, shall be taxable.
Information services shall include the following:
Charges to a person by financial institutions for account balance information shall not be subject to the tax.
The sale of information which is gathered or compiled on behalf a particular client shall not be subject to tax if the information is of a proprietary nature to that client and may not be sold to others by the person who gathered or compiled the information. However, this exclusion shall not apply to the sales of software which are taxable under § 474 of this chapter. Any subsequent sale of such information by the client for whom the information was gathered or compiled is subject to the tax.
Vendors providing information services may issue a resale certificate on all tangible personal property or services purchased for resale or rental either in the same form or for incorporation in the same form as a material part of other property or services being produced or provided for resale or rental. For example, if information is to be sold on a cassette tape, the vendor could purchase the tape with a resale certificate.
Information services performed, purchased, or delivered outside of the District but subsequently brought into the District for use or consumption shall be subject to the District use tax; Provided, that no sales tax is required to be paid to the other jurisdiction.
Information services performed or delivered outside of the District for use within other jurisdictions, as well as for use within the District shall be subject to a prorated share of the District use tax; Provided, that no sales tax was required to be paid on that prorated share to the other jurisdiction. Information services sold and delivered by the vendor to locations outside of the District shall be exempt from the sales tax.
Subscriptions to cable television shall not be considered to be information services and shall not be taxable.
Vendors providing temporary help to perform information services shall be subject to the tax on these services. The tax shall be collected even if the temporary help performs some inconsequential nontaxable services. However, vendors providing temporary help for nontaxable services shall not be required to collect the tax if that help also performs some inconsequential taxable information services.
Purchasers of information services used to perform professional services, such as accounting and legal services, shall be considered consumers of the information services and thus shall be subject to the tax on the services.
D.C. Mun. Regs. tit. 9, r. 9-475