⚠️ This is not tax advice. This project summarizes public information and links to official sources so your AI assistant can brief you. Verify anything you plan to act on with RITA (ritaohio.com, 800-860-7482) or a qualified tax professional.
If you live or work in Northeast Ohio, chances are a chunk of your paycheck goes to municipal income tax through RITA (the Regional Income Tax Agency). If you work from home some or all of the time — or your employer withholds for a city you don't actually work in — you may be owed a refund, claimed on Form 10A. Most people never file it. The clearest winners are people who live outside RITA — in a township or a non-RITA city — while a RITA municipality's tax is withheld from their paycheck at work: for them, a refund of home-worked days is money nobody claws back.
This repository is a knowledge bundle about exactly that: RITA municipal income tax, who owes what to which city, and how Form 10A refunds work — written to be read by your AI assistant, not by you.
- You live outside RITA but pay a RITA city's tax at work — a township (Hinckley, Sharon, Bainbridge…) or a non-RITA city (Brunswick, Parma): the headline case. A refund of home-worked days comes back with nothing clawed back at home (townships) or settled only under your own city's rules.
- You live in one RITA city and work in another — usually still worth filing. Residents of 322 of RITA's 413 municipalities (78%) keep part of a typical workplace refund, because most residence credits are zero, partial, or capped: a Medina resident keeps an illustrative ~1.8% of home-worked wages, Cleveland Heights ~1.5%, Bay Village ~1.0%, Strongsville ~0.5%. Money is money — 0.5% of $60,000 of home-worked wages is $300 a year, and three tax years are open at any time. The full ranked table: What residents keep.
- Figures are illustrative, computed from RITA's published rates table; each city's ordinance controls the actual credit. The bundle links you to both.
Point your AI (Claude, ChatGPT, or any assistant that can read files or URLs) at this repository and ask your question in plain English:
"I live in Medina and worked from home 3 days a week in 2024 while my employer withheld Cleveland-area city tax. Am I owed anything?"
Your assistant starts at rita-10a-okf/index.md, walks to the relevant pages, and briefs you — with citations to the actual law, RITA's own publications, and your municipality's real rates. You confirm anything that matters with RITA or a tax preparer.
- Plain-language explanations of how Ohio municipal income tax works (residence vs. workplace, credits, the 20-day rule, why townships are different).
- The Form 10A refund procedures, step by step, including the work-from-home scenario — plus a one-stop links page to the actual forms, rules, and statutes.
- A sub-bundle per municipality — all 413 RITA member cities and villages, each with its own directory: profile, published tax rate and credit, and city-specific refund mechanics, generated from RITA's own rates data (plus a table of the 64 JEDD/JEDZ special districts).
- The law behind it (Ohio Revised Code Chapter 718, the 2020–2021 pandemic rules, and the court decisions that settled them).
- Worked example scenarios.
This bundle is a filing aide, not a substitute for the documents: it explains, then links you to the actual form PDFs, the actual statutes, and the actual agency pages.
Every factual claim is cited. The full research log — every source URL and the date it was retrieved — is in rita-10a-okf/sources/SOURCES.md.
rita-10a-okf/— the knowledge bundle itself. This is what you point your AI at. Everything inside is OKF: markdown nodes with YAML frontmatter, per-directory indexes, a change log, and the source log.scripts/— maintenance tooling (not part of the bundle): fetches RITA's published rates data and regenerates the municipality sub-bundles and directory indexes.
The bundle uses the Open Knowledge Format (OKF) v0.1: a plain directory of markdown files with YAML frontmatter and per-directory indexes, designed so AI agents can navigate knowledge the way you'd browse a well-organized binder. No special tooling required — it's just files.
This bundle briefs; it does not advise. Nothing here is tax, legal, or financial advice. Tax rules are year-specific and change; every page states which tax years it applies to and when its facts were last verified. Confirm anything you plan to act on with RITA (ritaohio.com, 800-860-7482) or a qualified tax preparer.
This repository is a real-world example of sharing knowledge in a form built for AI. It uses the Open Knowledge Format because OKF is appealingly simple: plain markdown files with a small YAML header, organized by folders and indexes — no database, no embeddings, no special tooling. An assistant reads an index, follows links to just the pages it needs, and cites its sources, the same way a careful person would use a well-organized binder. Knowledge published this way is inspectable, correctable, and versioned — it's just files in git.
The point is effort spent once so you don't have to repeat it: the statutes have been located and quoted, the court decision cited, RITA's forms collected, and all 477 rate-table entries pulled from RITA's own data and spot-verified against primary sources — with every source URL and retrieval date logged. Your AI starts from that finished work instead of re-searching the open web and hoping.
Built by Jeff Tirey, a Northeast Ohio local. Jeff builds AI systems for real-world businesses at thalatta.ai.
Corrections and contributions welcome — open an issue.