My tax accountant mis-filed my taxes a couple years ago, which cost me about $20K (which I learned after I switched to another accountant later). Don't know if Claude / GPT would make the same mistake or not given SOTA today, but feels like there's an opportunity for models to be saving me thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a year.
>mis-filed my taxes a couple years ago, which cost me about $20K
What do you mean by "cost you $20K"? That your tax liability was calculated by the accountant to be higher than it actually should have been? Or that the accountant calculated your liability too low, which was caught and billed by the IRS?
In the first case, you can still file for a refund within 3 years (I'm omitting some technical details), but in the latter case, as mentioned by others, you still owe the tax whether it was correctly reported on your original return or not.
Someone still needs to take liability for mistakes.
The real issue is that accountant most likely has a track record of those kinds of mistakes - but you have no info on other clients. So you weren’t as informed at the time you chose them vs the new one.
People misunderstand the concept of liability. Yes your tax professional is liabile for fraud or gross misconduct, but if they make a mistake which results in unpaid taxes or fees you're still the one on the hook.
Typically you are on the hook for paying the actual taxes and penalties, but if you acted in good faith on the negligent advice of a tax professional many jurisdictions allow you to recover the costs of penalties and interest accrued as a result of the negligent advice.
The IRS made it crystal clear to me long ago. The tax filer is responsible for everything on the tax return, regardless of the preparer. Of course, accountants can be liable in other ways, but the filer has to pay the fines if the accountant makes a mistake.
From the IRS' point of view, the tax-payer is responsible for paying all of it. You can then turn around and sue to recover any of the fees/fines or penalties incurred as a result of an error made by the accountant, not the actual taxes though.
yeah i think liability ultimately lies on the individual. of course, you could sue your accountant, but that feels hard, maybe almost as hard as suing the model providers.
At least in Poland it is not viable. Friend's business lost noticeable amount of money because accountant has not filed taxes and lied that they filed and lied that they checked it.
And there was no real path to recovering funds, except small part, after long court case.
At least they were able to fire them without severance pay.
I'm also 0 for 4 on tax preparers / tax accountants, so I concur with you its best to just do it yourself, which is what I now do. Only time I ever got audited (and failed) was when I had employed an accountant, since then I've never had a problem including passing audits. The tax code isn't /that/ complicated for most people's situation, and it's well worth understanding it.
I'm 1 for 6. And my current firm is overworked. I'm moving to do it myself (three companies, fund admin and personal). Recently Found a Tax-Accountant, not a CPA, who does advice only, no paperwork, who I'm using to cross-check my AI tools.
I had Gemini help me with RMD calculations for an estate I manage. Advice was mostly good. Wrong about withholding for both US and CA. Missed deductions on US. Was accurate on MFJ and spousal death impacts.
I've found it so far more effective for preparation than for planning/advice.
I've got a plan to feed the laws and rules and instructions into the machine before the prompts - is RAG still cool? Maybe I should small-language this?
I wonder if you use opus 5.5 and let it research using the internet what you would get. I use opus 5.5 for legal stuff and it's generally great, but you do have to give it access to the web.
I have a non-trivial tax situation, as a US citizen living abroad. I prepare my own tax returns, never having found a cross-border tax preparer I trust, and have for the past few years, fed my draft return along with all the supporting paperwork into Claude. It has:
1. found errors, e.g. where I used the incorrect exchange rate (and managed to work out how I had made that error, which I was impressed by)
2. found items which would appear to be errors except for context it did not know
3. flagged areas where it disagreed with me as to the correct tax treatment, but accepted that the law is ambiguous (and in some cases I preferred its interpretation after additional research and in other cases I did not)
4. flagged areas where it disagreed with IRS guidance, and only acknowledged said guidance after I provided links to it
5. provided highly inaccurate estimated tax calculations, and not been able to fix its estimates even when challenged
So my takeaway is that it is a very useful tool for tax, but perhaps unsurprisingly, it is not good enough to dump all your paperwork into and expect a shiny return you don't need to check. (Possibly it is if you just have a W-2 and no other substantial income, but I can't speak for that scenario.)
I'm also in a non-trivial tax situation, GPT Sol did better than my specialist accountant this year. It needed a lot of steering from me and about 2B tokens, but that is better than spending $3-4k in preparation fees. Total time to prepare and handle steering was still less than I normally spend on tax prep with my accountant.
I think what helped is giving it 100+ pdf and csv documents of my full situation so it knew everything about me and could cross-reference with all my bank statements.
Try this, it uses a tax engine as the backbone and provides feedback for Claude if it goes off the rails. Albeit it doesn't support every tax scenario.
I appreciate the recommendation, but as it happens I have already solved the estimated issue (mostly by just preparing a full return with estimated next year's figures, which while time-heavy is going to be more accurate). And for what it's worth, I suspect it wouldn't work for me - cross-border is extraordinarily complicated because of the tax treaties (indeed there is a dedicated IRS form to disclose the effect and rationale of any treaty based position), and given there is no obvious note on the documentation for it that there is cross-border support I doubt there is.
(And as I said to another commenter, I think it would be advisable in this thread for people to expressly acknowledge or disclaim any interest in or prior experience with any particular product)
I also had a great experience being consulted by an LLM regarding registering a business as a foreigner. Except I'm still very sceptical since it's not my area of expertise and consequences for a mistake are very high.
Are you saying I should use this (or it looks like one of their portfolio companies) as my return preparer, or as a replacement for Claude my return-checker? If the former, I would want to know why I should trust it; if the latter, I would want to know why I should pay for their services given I am already playing Anthropic for a subscription plan anyway.
(It would also help to know if you had a financial interest in or prior experience with this company)
Not related but I hope QuickBooks learn something and make their software better.
I downloaded 1700 of my transactions and use AI to build an app for it, so I can analyze the transactions and make sure that everything is properly categorized.
It used to take me whole day because of the Quickbooks. It took me less than an hour to go through all the transactions.
In Germany, there are companies like Buhl data that let you do your tax return very easily and give a live estimate of your return based on the data you provided. From my experience over the past 5 years, its prediction error is less than 5%.
I used Grok Bot and found out that I could offset some stock value going down and get back ~$300. I gave it my bank statements, email access (which had my stocks monthly report as attachment) and a few other things.
I'd have honestly never been able to do it myself - its just too tedious.
There is currently a bill in Congress to finally allow regulation of paid tax preparers. Not sure if addresses AI, but probably not.
https://www.accountingtoday.com/news/new-bill-calls-for-irs-...
There is also an IRS form (14157) to report a return preparer complaint, which of course does not include an option to report a faulty AI.
My tax accountant mis-filed my taxes a couple years ago, which cost me about $20K (which I learned after I switched to another accountant later). Don't know if Claude / GPT would make the same mistake or not given SOTA today, but feels like there's an opportunity for models to be saving me thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a year.
>mis-filed my taxes a couple years ago, which cost me about $20K
What do you mean by "cost you $20K"? That your tax liability was calculated by the accountant to be higher than it actually should have been? Or that the accountant calculated your liability too low, which was caught and billed by the IRS?
In the first case, you can still file for a refund within 3 years (I'm omitting some technical details), but in the latter case, as mentioned by others, you still owe the tax whether it was correctly reported on your original return or not.
Sounds like an opportunity which could end up costing or saving $10k and which may be difficult to evaluate.
Someone still needs to take liability for mistakes.
The real issue is that accountant most likely has a track record of those kinds of mistakes - but you have no info on other clients. So you weren’t as informed at the time you chose them vs the new one.
People misunderstand the concept of liability. Yes your tax professional is liabile for fraud or gross misconduct, but if they make a mistake which results in unpaid taxes or fees you're still the one on the hook.
Typically you are on the hook for paying the actual taxes and penalties, but if you acted in good faith on the negligent advice of a tax professional many jurisdictions allow you to recover the costs of penalties and interest accrued as a result of the negligent advice.
How much money does that take?
Yeah, I looked him up just now actually, and he has a 3-star rating on Yelp... Which I think is pretty low for accountants?
I think the red flag should have been when he printed out all my tax returns and made me pick them up in person, and didn't even send a digital copy.
In this case accountant DID NOT take liability for mistakes.
It's not the accountant that paid $20k for his mistake but the accountant's client.
i'm a bit unclear who has the liability even when you use a CPA. accountants are humans that sometimes make mistakes.
The IRS made it crystal clear to me long ago. The tax filer is responsible for everything on the tax return, regardless of the preparer. Of course, accountants can be liable in other ways, but the filer has to pay the fines if the accountant makes a mistake.
From the IRS' point of view, the tax-payer is responsible for paying all of it. You can then turn around and sue to recover any of the fees/fines or penalties incurred as a result of an error made by the accountant, not the actual taxes though.
In NZ the liability is generally on you and not the accountant.
> Someone still needs to take liability for mistakes.
I am not aware of setups available to me that would transfer liability onto accountant.
So in either case I am taking liability.
(also, I am pretty sure that if corporation loses 10 millions over accountant making bad decisions, they are not going to recover that funds either)
yeah i think liability ultimately lies on the individual. of course, you could sue your accountant, but that feels hard, maybe almost as hard as suing the model providers.
Yes, at least in the US the individual must sign their own return.
At least in Poland it is not viable. Friend's business lost noticeable amount of money because accountant has not filed taxes and lied that they filed and lied that they checked it.
And there was no real path to recovering funds, except small part, after long court case.
At least they were able to fire them without severance pay.
My obligatory comment about my experience with tax accountants:
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2022/Nov/do-you-trust-your-tax-...
I'm also 0 for 4 on tax preparers / tax accountants, so I concur with you its best to just do it yourself, which is what I now do. Only time I ever got audited (and failed) was when I had employed an accountant, since then I've never had a problem including passing audits. The tax code isn't /that/ complicated for most people's situation, and it's well worth understanding it.
I'm 1 for 6. And my current firm is overworked. I'm moving to do it myself (three companies, fund admin and personal). Recently Found a Tax-Accountant, not a CPA, who does advice only, no paperwork, who I'm using to cross-check my AI tools.
Useless benchmark as it seems to be evaluating literally only the weights.
I had Gemini help me with RMD calculations for an estate I manage. Advice was mostly good. Wrong about withholding for both US and CA. Missed deductions on US. Was accurate on MFJ and spousal death impacts.
I've found it so far more effective for preparation than for planning/advice.
I've got a plan to feed the laws and rules and instructions into the machine before the prompts - is RAG still cool? Maybe I should small-language this?
I wonder if you use opus 5.5 and let it research using the internet what you would get. I use opus 5.5 for legal stuff and it's generally great, but you do have to give it access to the web.
I have a non-trivial tax situation, as a US citizen living abroad. I prepare my own tax returns, never having found a cross-border tax preparer I trust, and have for the past few years, fed my draft return along with all the supporting paperwork into Claude. It has:
1. found errors, e.g. where I used the incorrect exchange rate (and managed to work out how I had made that error, which I was impressed by)
2. found items which would appear to be errors except for context it did not know
3. flagged areas where it disagreed with me as to the correct tax treatment, but accepted that the law is ambiguous (and in some cases I preferred its interpretation after additional research and in other cases I did not)
4. flagged areas where it disagreed with IRS guidance, and only acknowledged said guidance after I provided links to it
5. provided highly inaccurate estimated tax calculations, and not been able to fix its estimates even when challenged
So my takeaway is that it is a very useful tool for tax, but perhaps unsurprisingly, it is not good enough to dump all your paperwork into and expect a shiny return you don't need to check. (Possibly it is if you just have a W-2 and no other substantial income, but I can't speak for that scenario.)
I'm also in a non-trivial tax situation, GPT Sol did better than my specialist accountant this year. It needed a lot of steering from me and about 2B tokens, but that is better than spending $3-4k in preparation fees. Total time to prepare and handle steering was still less than I normally spend on tax prep with my accountant.
I think what helped is giving it 100+ pdf and csv documents of my full situation so it knew everything about me and could cross-reference with all my bank statements.
https://claude.com/marketplace/connectors/aiwyn-tax
Try this, it uses a tax engine as the backbone and provides feedback for Claude if it goes off the rails. Albeit it doesn't support every tax scenario.
I appreciate the recommendation, but as it happens I have already solved the estimated issue (mostly by just preparing a full return with estimated next year's figures, which while time-heavy is going to be more accurate). And for what it's worth, I suspect it wouldn't work for me - cross-border is extraordinarily complicated because of the tax treaties (indeed there is a dedicated IRS form to disclose the effect and rationale of any treaty based position), and given there is no obvious note on the documentation for it that there is cross-border support I doubt there is.
(And as I said to another commenter, I think it would be advisable in this thread for people to expressly acknowledge or disclaim any interest in or prior experience with any particular product)
I also had a great experience being consulted by an LLM regarding registering a business as a foreigner. Except I'm still very sceptical since it's not my area of expertise and consequences for a mistake are very high.
you were consulted by an LLM?
He said he's a foreigner, almost certainly a mistranslation.
check out https://www.multiplierholdings.com/
it's the most ai-native tax experience for US citizens abroad
Are you saying I should use this (or it looks like one of their portfolio companies) as my return preparer, or as a replacement for Claude my return-checker? If the former, I would want to know why I should trust it; if the latter, I would want to know why I should pay for their services given I am already playing Anthropic for a subscription plan anyway.
(It would also help to know if you had a financial interest in or prior experience with this company)
I'm surprised Sonnet 5.5 did noticeably better than Opus and Fable. Same pattern in their other benchmarks.
I like their benchmarks. They ask the right, not easy questions: https://surgehq.ai/blog/sudo-l7
Has anyone verified to see if they hold up?
Not related but I hope QuickBooks learn something and make their software better.
I downloaded 1700 of my transactions and use AI to build an app for it, so I can analyze the transactions and make sure that everything is properly categorized. It used to take me whole day because of the Quickbooks. It took me less than an hour to go through all the transactions.
There's also: https://github.com/column-tax/tax-calc-bench
wonder if we should bring back https://taxheaven3000.com/ in the age of ai
What is human baseline? How it stacks against 10% LLM accuracy?..
i want to always have a fast way of reviewing my tax returns without having to hassle my accountant or hire another one.
In Germany, there are companies like Buhl data that let you do your tax return very easily and give a live estimate of your return based on the data you provided. From my experience over the past 5 years, its prediction error is less than 5%.
They exist in USA - eg: freetaxusa.com
Sharing all my financial info with LLM companies is not something that I like.
EDIT: good point that paying accountant does not ensure avoiding it
wonderful, you made a good point that make me dislike situation even more
Your accountant sure will.
Most accountants will not in fact share client data with an LLM company.
Some inference providers have a Zero Data Retention policy
Worst case scenario what does OpenAI do with your tax return?
Oh look, yet another reason to use local inference.
I used Grok Bot and found out that I could offset some stock value going down and get back ~$300. I gave it my bank statements, email access (which had my stocks monthly report as attachment) and a few other things.
I'd have honestly never been able to do it myself - its just too tedious.