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In this story
Filing options • AI advances • Tax questions • AI caveats • Personalized answers • Expert vetting
These days you have more options for preparing your taxes than filling out forms by hand.
- Mail or upload records to your accountant and let a professional handle the details.
- Deliver the paperwork and meet in person.
- Put your financial information into tax software and file your own taxes — though you might have to summon a human expert along the way.
About 55 percent of people ages 50 to 64 and 59 percent of those 65 and older paid a tax preparer to file their most recent federal return, according to a 2021 IRS survey. A third of 18- to 24-year-olds did so.
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But in all, 53 percent of the adults surveyed paid a human tax preparer. Some of the reason is likely a confusing tax code.
Now some tax preparation companies are looking at another alternative: artificial intelligence (AI).
AI isn’t replacing your human tax expert
AI won’t replace a living, breathing certified public accountant (CPA) or tax attorney anytime soon. But even if it’s not this year, AI will increasingly play a role in the way many folks get their taxes done.
Already two of the largest tax prep companies, H&R Block and Intuit, have added generative AI into their products and services, both behind the scenes and in ways more visible to users.
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In simple terms, generative AIs can generate text, images and other content based on how they’re prompted by a user and the massive amounts of data they were trained on.
In fall 2023, Intuit, which produces the popular TurboTax do-it-yourself software, announced a generative AI financial assistant called Intuit Assist. It works across the company’s product lines, including TurboTax software and TurboTax Live.
H&R Block followed with its own AI-fueled offering. H&R Block AI Tax Assist is billed as a product designed to streamline tax preparation for individuals, the self-employed and small-business owners.
What tax questions can an AI answer?
Whether you’re doing your own taxes or relying on a CPA, numerous questions are likely to pop up in the weeks ahead of the April 15 tax deadline, especially if your return is complicated.
You may be asking: What itemized deductions can I take from my home office? How will the fact that I recently qualified for Social Security affect my return? What about the income I made from a side job or rental property? How do I deal with a larger-than-expected cash windfall I received this year? Why did I get a 1099-K?
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