alt Hacker NewsI have a non-trivial tax situation, as a US citizen living abroad. I prepare my own tax returns, never having found a cross-border tax preparer I trust, and have for the past few years, fed my draft return along with all the supporting paperwork into Claude. It has:
1. found errors, e.g. where I used the incorrect exchange rate (and managed to work out how I had made that error, which I was impressed by)
2. found items which would appear to be errors except for context it did not know
3. flagged areas where it disagreed with me as to the correct tax treatment, but accepted that the law is ambiguous (and in some cases I preferred its interpretation after additional research and in other cases I did not)
4. flagged areas where it disagreed with IRS guidance, and only acknowledged said guidance after I provided links to it
5. provided highly inaccurate estimated tax calculations, and not been able to fix its estimates even when challenged
So my takeaway is that it is a very useful tool for tax, but perhaps unsurprisingly, it is not good enough to dump all your paperwork into and expect a shiny return you don't need to check. (Possibly it is if you just have a W-2 and no other substantial income, but I can't speak for that scenario.)
Replies
> I have a non-trivial tax situation, as a US citizen living abroad.
Same situation as you. I have a local accountant in the country I'm in plus my US accountant. Claude/ChatGPT have been a huge help for checking, explaining, and finding issues. They also found websites with pertinent information that Google did not, which surprised me.
Similarly, had Claude look at my past returns and found mistakes in my records.
I had it prepare an analysis and then found a professional to confirm everything and then handle doing the amendment.
Definitely useful as a second pair of eyes.
I'm also in a non-trivial tax situation, GPT Sol did better than my specialist accountant this year. It needed a lot of steering from me and about 2B tokens, but that is better than spending $3-4k in preparation fees. Total time to prepare and handle steering was still less than I normally spend on tax prep with my accountant.
I think what helped is giving it 100+ pdf and csv documents of my full situation so it knew everything about me and could cross-reference with all my bank statements.
https://claude.com/marketplace/connectors/aiwyn-tax
Try this, it uses a tax engine as the backbone and provides feedback for Claude if it goes off the rails. Albeit it doesn't support every tax scenario.
I also had a great experience consulting LLM regarding registering a business as a foreigner. Except I'm still very sceptical since it's not my area of expertise and consequences for a mistake are very high.
check out https://www.multiplierholdings.com/
it's the most ai-native tax experience for US citizens abroad
I have a company abroad in addition to living abroad. It’s kind of a nightmare to do my US taxes and costs me easily $2000 per year right now. I was hoping I could have an agent do them after I have a few years of data and point it at the source statements and the end result forms