The entire reason that tax software is hard is that it can NEVER produce a wrong answer. Plus tax law is about ten thousand times more complicated than you're assuming.
No tax software or expert will never produce a wrong answer, because too many questions have no guaranteed right answer, due to inconsistent interpretatios within the IRS.
Tax filing is a matter of risk balancing, which heuristics are great at optimizing, if they incorporate enough data. Neural networks are ideal for that, but it would take a lot of data gathering to develop the model, from data that isn't easily scraped from Web pages.
People file incorrect tax amounts all the time. It's the government's job to verify the return and either refund you or request more money. There's a decent margin for error, and not all returns are audited so the IRS must also have a margin for error they're building policy and budgets around.
You need legal documents to be accurate and deterministic, not for some LLM to make shit up and have you inadvertently and incompetently lie to the IRS.
The only reason I care about companies having my data is that it means the government can get to it. In this case I am required to give my data to the government anyway, so why would I care if OpenAI / Google has it?
ISTM one ought to be able to use AI to translate the official IRS forms to a machine readable format. No personal data needs to go anywhere near the AI.
Even if you do want to feed your personal data to an AI tax bot, this should be easily within the capabilities of a model that can run locally.
> translate the official IRS forms to a machine readable format
The instructions for each form published by the IRS every year are already written by professional technical writers to be unambiguous. Do you mean that someone ought to write a simplified english grammar transpiler? I think that would genuinely be interesting. What's missing are the guidelines the technical writers are using, but that can probably be derived.
Also, a good satire presents what the author believes is the right thing as well as ridiculing the wrong thing. "A Modest Proposal" is famous for the proposition that the Irish should eat their own babies - ridiculing the obviously wrong solution of blaming the Irish for their problems but it also explicitly lists things that would work in the guise of dismissing them as unworkable. Ideas like taxing the people who own everything in Ireland (many of whom were not Irish), and that's much less famous but it's right there in the text.
