11–20 of 34 posts
I can't imagine doing something like this anytime soon, but I will probably follow the advice around having AI check the return against all my forms and previous years return before submitting.
If you're going to do this, you should also use well-respected tax filing software for free to create your return. They usually only charge you to file it. Prepare it in their system, see if you get different results then Claude, figure out the discrepancy.
https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...
> The IRS already has your W-2s, your 1099s, your brokerage statements. It knows the tax rules. For most Americans, the government could calculate their tax bill, send them a pre-filled return, and let them approve or dispute the result. This is how it works in the UK, Japan, Germany, and dozens of other countries. The reason it doesn’t work that way here is that Intuit and H&R Block have spent decades and hundreds o…
Imho, the fact that you can probably guess which party is which is some evidence that the cliche that both parties are the same isn't really true anymore.
There is nothing complicated about these, a 1099-R is one of the more straightforward info forms and any tax software can handle the input numbers and distribution code. Whether the IRA is inherited or not does not add complexity to the 1099-R, so not sure why this attribute gets multiple mentions.
The only other thing that might be considered complicated is the Form 1116 foreign tax credit. MFJ filers don't need it if total is $600 or less, so this might have added needless complexity.
Interesting that there is no Schedule A here, because that is one form (of many) that gives the lie to those who claim "oh the government already knows everything about your tax filing and could generate your return for you".
In short, this exercise didn't really involve any "intelligence" beyond what every tax software already does.
>E-filing isn’t available for trust returns
False.
They had sent me a detailed quote for their service. Upon cancellation they sent me a "final" bill with some bogus final fees inflating the quote by about 50%. Their claim, correct, was that the fee was present in T&C, buried somewhere in para 70. But under UK law, there are various protections against it - not to mention, if you send someone a quote, you don't then say "surprise"!
I fed Claude all the materials, their T&C's, the emails etc. It gave me a legal basis for suing them in small claims court. One of the 4 was hallucinated, but easy to validé, and the remaining 3 were solid. It then wrote me the sharp refusal to pay with a threat to sue for fraudulent business practice.
I'm sure any real lawyer would look at this and laugh, but it did the trick. No way would I ever do all this on my own.
Even so, you should never trust their calculations. Don't have it file your taxes, have it explain to you how to file your taxes. Use it to dig through all the bureaucratic forms and let it help you find your way. Don't let it do it for you, because you have no idea where it might end up, and filing your taxes incorrectly can have severe consequences.
He checked the work with a LLM too? Does this guy want to get audited by the IRS? I'm also not sure I'd feel comfortable giving my tax details to an AI company to train on. How does Anthropic pricing work exactly? Were the 150k tokens really free or would you need to pay a subscription and/or overage for that?
I'm pretty sure grok already has them after DOGE scraped all the data the IRS and the treasury department’s bureau of fiscal service had on the American public.
If you have simple taxes, you can probably figure out how to file yourself, as it’s mostly just copying from a box on one form into another. If you have complex taxes, you should have a CPA prepare them.