Key Takeaways
- According to tax experts who spoke with Bloomberg, chatbots keep making mistakes with tax returns.
- They give misinformed advice and are prone to misreading digits on tax documents.
- A Loyola University Chicago study found that chatbots answered a simple tax question incorrectly two-thirds of the time.
A new survey by Adobe shows that 26% of U.S. workers plan to use AI to help file their taxes this year, up from 11% last year. Over half of Americans surveyed reported feeling stressed about filing their taxes.
As more workers turn to ChatGPT and Claude to help with tax season and alleviate stress, it’s important to note the limitations of AI chatbots. According to tax experts who spoke with Bloomberg this week, AI bots keep making mistakes. They give misinformed advice, based on outdated rules, and are prone to errors when reading digits off of tax documents.
“Tax is incredibly nuanced,” April Walker, a senior manager at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, told the outlet.
How people are using AI for taxes
One AI consultant, Martijn Lancee, explained to Bloomberg how he used Claude to file his taxes. He downloaded his tax documents, containing information on business expenses, bank statements and bills, as PDFs on his computer and asked Claude to use the information to create a spreadsheet with different tabs. He then checked the spreadsheet and sent it to his accountant.
Lancee didn’t tell his accountant that AI helped him out this year. “I’m sure he noticed,” he told the outlet, “because the output was a lot better than last year.”
Another consultant, Zhiyao Pei, asked three AI chatbots to assess how California’s business-franchise tax would impact his business. “They actually had a fight,” he told Bloomberg. Google’s Gemini AI chatbot derided the work of another chatbot as a “hallucination.” At the end of the day, Pei paid California the greatest amount the chatbots suggested.
Paul Prina, a Boston resident, told The Wall Street Journal that he used ChatGPT to calculate the estimated taxes due for 2025 on an investment account. “I saved a lot of time in doing the calculations, and it saved a call in to my accountant,” he told The Journal.
Steve Kleiner, a small business owner in Lakemont, Pennsylvania, told The Journal that he used AI to convert business expenses written in a Google Doc into clean data needed to file taxes. “Huge, and I mean huge, time saver overall,” he said.
The pitfalls of using AI to file taxes
Joshua Youngblood makes his living helping people who’ve gotten on the wrong side of the IRS — and lately, he’s seeing business pick up. “I hate to be that person,” he told Bloomberg, “but [AI] is definitely going to create some issues.”
One of his clients is already in hot water after an AI chatbot wrongly assured them they didn’t need to report crypto income under $3,000. The IRS, of course, disagreed. “ChatGPT is really good at telling you what you want to hear,” according to Youngblood.
A Loyola University Chicago study from November put AI bots to the test with a simple tax question: how much of a home sale is exempt from capital gains tax? The results weren’t great — the bots got it wrong about two-thirds of the time.
TurboTax has been quietly using AI for years to guide users through its software, but on a short leash, according to Keela Robison, Intuit’s vice president of product management. “Right now, we do not feel that LLMs can process taxes, certainly not complicated taxes,” she told Bloomberg.
Key Takeaways
- According to tax experts who spoke with Bloomberg, chatbots keep making mistakes with tax returns.
- They give misinformed advice and are prone to misreading digits on tax documents.
- A Loyola University Chicago study found that chatbots answered a simple tax question incorrectly two-thirds of the time.
A new survey by Adobe shows that 26% of U.S. workers plan to use AI to help file their taxes this year, up from 11% last year. Over half of Americans surveyed reported feeling stressed about filing their taxes.
As more workers turn to ChatGPT and Claude to help with tax season and alleviate stress, it’s important to note the limitations of AI chatbots. According to tax experts who spoke with Bloomberg this week, AI bots keep making mistakes. They give misinformed advice, based on outdated rules, and are prone to errors when reading digits off of tax documents.
“Tax is incredibly nuanced,” April Walker, a senior manager at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, told the outlet.
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