I must admit that I disagree and believe that AI will only be used more as it improves. There is already a big difference between GPT-4 and GPT-5 in terms of hallucinations. If AI can do your tax accounting in 20 seconds with a 95% probability of accuracy (perhaps better than most accountants—after all, who can really understand tax legislation?) and with some clear checksums, who wouldn't use it instead of doing it themselves? In addition, AI is really excellent at inferring meaning from data (and see relations).
For most folks, filing your taxes is already mostly automated and requires a time investment of maybe 45 to 60 minutes per year. Would it be nice to reduce that down to 20 seconds? Sure, but it's not going to materially change anything in the financial life of most people. I'm all for it if it could be done reliably at scale. Outlier cases where taxation is complicated enough that it's possible to engineer substantial and meaningful financial outcomes often count more as business finance than personal finance. I'm sure artificial intelligence will indeed be more disruptive to business and corporate finance. For true personal finance, though, I suspect it may be more predatory than helpful by selling people into bad decisions that sound smart (which banks, etc., already try to do with so-called financial advisors).
Keep in mind a 5% failure rate would likely be >10 million incorrect tax filings per year solely due to AI errors, not inclusive of additional incorrect filings due to human error as well.
Better idea: the U.S. could adopt the income tax practices of most other countries, where the revenue service tells you what you owe, instead of making you guess. No need for A.I. or Intuit.
Fwiw iirc Intuit has to offer a free version of their tool with the same capabilties but it is so hidden from everybody behind so much stuff that its hard for people to reach there.
Honestly, yes there shouldn't really even be a discussion about this. US should definitely do it. I think US and India are the only two major countries still stuck on something like this and I am not sure if there are really any advantages of it.
For the 95% of people who get all their income from W2/1099 compensation, bank accounts, and brokerage accounts and who either take the standard deduction or whose only itemised deductions are dependents, mortgage interest, and SALT, there's really no need for filing tax returns at all. But the tax accounting and tax software industries lobby to prevent it.
In the current AI = LLM world, why have a language model do taxes? Why not just have AI help you adapt your non AI tax planning platform to local tax laws by reading and comprehending them at scale, a language task, instead?
