It's not hard to imagine that will be able to do as good a job as a human accountant in the not too distant future.
It's also not hard to imagine tax authorities using AI to audit everyone's tax returns every year.
We sure live in interesting times.
It's not hard to imagine that will be able to do as good a job as a human accountant in the not too distant future.
It's also not hard to imagine tax authorities using AI to audit everyone's tax returns every year.
We sure live in interesting times.
The real test to see if AI is just a rich person thing will be to see how the tax authorities treat it, even for more complex returns.
They can save humans for the really complex edge case stuff but at the end of the day, the tax code is just checkboxes and input forms that get boiled down into Integers, Floats/Doubles and enumerated choices with some Strings for deductions
I've submitted my German taxes this year using a mix of Claude 4.6 and Claude 4.7, with lots of manual checking. The German Finanzamt granted most of the things I listed in the tax return (they send you an official letter by post) -- I did have to appeal for one of the items though (again using Claude, this time 4.8 ).
The most important thing I've found is to ask Claude to thoroughly audit the reply (to find all hallucinations). I usually ask it to give me an enumerated list of all facts and all legal cases quoted, and then I give it to a new instance to carefully validate each one.
Newer models are getting much better at not hallucinating German case law though :)
Have you considered using using two completely different models and comparing their output in order to catch hallucinations?
Bookkeeping is not tax preparation, just FYI. The reports generated by an accounting system are used on tax returns for companies, but they’re distinctly different things.