"Anyone who has dealt with the IRS knows that preparing a physical package, driving to the post office, and paying for certified mail is a time-consuming chore." - certainly true but the easiest part compared to preparing all the forms one needs if one has multiple income sources, donations or DAFs, foreign income/accounts, self employed/business expenses, SEP-IRA or IRA, Roth conversions, Rentals, Annuities, etc. Our tax preparer had completed >50 pages of forms using their professional SW package and "just" needed my signature (which I gave after two rounds of review). The reviews took > 15 hours despite having modeled my taxes with a primitive spreadsheet (which skipped NIIT and a bunch of other smaller things that resulted in ~10% differences in AGI/MAGI and taxes due).
Anyway, it's the (lack of) accuracy with Claude that keeps me from trying it for taxes.
Giving all documents to someone who can prepare a tax return, guarantee its correctness and ideally take care of delivering it to the IRS is the right UX.
"Anyone who has dealt with the IRS knows that preparing a physical package, driving to the post office, and paying for certified mail is a time-consuming chore." - certainly true but the easiest part compared to preparing all the forms one needs if one has multiple income sources, donations or DAFs, foreign income/accounts, self employed/business expenses, SEP-IRA or IRA, Roth conversions, Rentals, Annuities, etc. Our tax preparer had completed >50 pages of forms using their professional SW package and "just" needed my signature (which I gave after two rounds of review). The reviews took > 15 hours despite having modeled my taxes with a primitive spreadsheet (which skipped NIIT and a bunch of other smaller things that resulted in ~10% differences in AGI/MAGI and taxes due).
Anyway, it's the (lack of) accuracy with Claude that keeps me from trying it for taxes.
BTW, https://www.freetaxusa.com/ seems like a viable alternative to Turbotax for many people.
Giving all documents to someone who can prepare a tax return, guarantee its correctness and ideally take care of delivering it to the IRS is the right UX.
+1 to freetaxusa.com - the name is genius :)