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Source - Design Thinking! Comic
If the USA didn't have such a complicated tax system, with companies like Intuit lobbying to keep it that way so they still make money, this wouldn't be an issue.
A lot of countries automatically fill out your entire income tax return for you, and send it to you to verify it. If it's all good, you just need to accept it. Less than five minutes work.
What's it like in other countries for business owners? Because in the US, if you own a business (even a small one where you are the only employee) and try to do your taxes on your own, may god have mercy on your soul. Even doing it through an accountant is a total pain in the ass
At least here in Romania, it's the job of the accountant(s) to do the company's taxes. If you're self-employed or run a very small business (less than 10 employees) there are self-employed accountants who specialize in that and typically have 20-40 clients.
In France it's about three clicks every month to pay your social contributions for a small business
Then at the end of the year they send you a stupidly complicated form that makes no sense whatsoever, but if you go online you can do it incredibly easily
Intuit tried selling QuickBooks here, but withdrew from the market as there are so many free invoicing apps
If the USA didn’t have such a complicated tax system
For 95% of the public, its not complicated. Its just getting all the independent pieces of information from different private agencies.
Once you have all the numbers lined up, its simple arithmetic. Easy for a computer to do.
But knowing who to ask for all the individual chunks of data is an obnoxious chore that only one organization does particularly well. And that organization - the IRS - won't tell you the information they have. They want you to guess and tell them what you have, so they can tell you if you got it right or not.
And that organization - the IRS - won’t tell you the information they have. They want you to guess and tell them what you have, so they can tell you if you got it right or not.
This really needs to be fixed.
In Australia, the stuff the government knows about you gets prefilled in the tax return form. Not as good as other countries where the entire thing is completed for you, but better than the USA. The form is significantly shorter than the US one.
but better than the USA
When the bar is "You get nothing. Zero. Goose-egg." its fairly easy to clear.
The form is significantly shorter than the US one.
A big part of the US tax game is giving you a relatively high base rate and then sending you hunting for deductions and credits. One of the upshots of the Trump Tax Cut has been to raise the standard deduction so high that most of those deductions and credits are worthless. So the form is deceptively long. It's almost impossible to use your Schedule A for anything anymore.
Just reading that gave me a headache. In Latvia, heres how the system works.
If you have no deductible spending (medical, education, donations).:
If you have deductible info
In the UK your employer just does it for you
I don't understand why generative AI would be involved in a tax return? It's just data entry.
If your tax return needs creative assistance, maybe you should go to jail instead?
I think the point of this comic is that AI is doing all of the fun creative stuff for us but the jobs that we actually hate doing are beyond its capabilities.
Haven't most tax returns been automated since way before AI? Most methods can pull and auto-pop all the needed info. Usually after I give it my SSN or sometimes a number or two from the W2 it's done but for some clicking through review screens.
They have, yes. Doing math for your taxes is as simple a task as doing math that needs to be applied to your taxes in the correct order. There's no need for AI in that process at all.
The only potentially difficult part (massive "potentially" here) that doesn't involve math is probably having a UI that intuitively guides the user into selecting the right things that apply to them (if that data can't already be queried from somewhere else like a government site). But you don't really need AI for that either.
Have you actually done a large, nuanced return by hand. What does X mean? Where is X in this form? (cuz they don't use the same name). And do I need a Form 1234-56-A for that?
Like I understand what all of the concepts, but confirming and digesting the rules and paperwork is non trivial. Paying 300/hr for accountants to do it is even more painful.
No, I'm only 40 so I've never had to do a tax return by hand, I've always used a program.
Which is exactly what Intuit and TurboTax want.
Taxes should not require a third party to complete.
It should be the government saying, "Based on the information we have available, you owe $x. If you believe that is incorrect, please submit Form 1A."
Yep, I used the new federal website this year rather than h&r's free service.
I don't understand why data entry is even required when the gov has the data. I mean, I do understand, but...
Is nobody going to call out the stilted weirdness that is the first panel??
"I can artwork that for you" is gibberish.
"I can artwork that for you" is gibberish.
It is. Compare this fad gibberish:
Halfwits making nouns of verbs and verbs of nouns and plurals from mass nouns isn't a new thing.
France has an organization to prevent this mess. Where's our third-grade teachers when we need them?
Maybe France could gift you some?
Can we calendar a meeting to do a deep-dive—I mean, first maybe we can dialogue on whatever your email here is about, but on a go-forward basis, I think... well, just, wouldn't it be great if we were able to solution some shit or whatever?
It's better than the text you see in ai generated images
Because only one of those has to be 'correct'.
Using AI for tax calculations is one of the most insane and braindead ideas i have ever seen. Only topped by military, medical and surveillance applications.
Dont let anything AI near your money people.
I'd say the only thing worse than AI having access to your money is TurboTax having the same.
Lol you think Turbo Tax or your bank isn't using AI for all that?
Your bank is using AI for what really matters to it - figuring out how to sell you shit you don't need.
Boring solved problems, like encoding tax laws, or paying for a taco, tend not to use AI today, and aren't very likely to have it added, until it's hallucinations have gone way down.
Swear to God people don't understand how software works at all. It's like you said: solved problems don't need AI. I wish more people understood this. AI is insanely inefficient and power-hungry. Are there applications where it works and is the best tool for the job? Maybe? I don't know. The closest I've seen is in cases where you basically want to throw a bunch of random shit at the wall and see what sticks, and there's no real way to automate that properly.
But solved problems have solutions that are faster (like, orders of magnitude faster in most cases) and don't consume anywhere near as much power than AI. And people clearly don't understand how software works, because "power consumption" is a massive factor in how much you pay for cloud services (which is what most AI companies are doing).
IIRC some of the bigger banks / financial institutions use AI for fraud detections as well.
AI, or LLM, that doesn't know what to do. Hell no.
An automatic system that takes in human input (that's already sent to the gov via our employer), does some calculations and returns a result to us so that it can be verified and adjusted as needed by a human? Yes please.
So… the irs knows how much you’re paying before you ever file.
They could just send you a bill.
I agree with you but it's also a sorta. They don't know if you've done any under the table work that you need to report. With that said, they definitely could just have you log in securely with all your info already inputed and just have you double check and sign with the option to add more if needed. That's how the Australians do it iirc, just log in, check and sign.
“Under the table” sort of implies you won’t be reporting it. They know about 1099 type stuff, as well as getting reports from your brokerage and everywhere else.
90% of Americans the only real question is if you updated your w-4 or not to reflect recent changes as well as relevant deductions which probably should just go away. (I mean, seriously. I drive to work just factor in the average and call it good- don’t make me track mileage.)
If they don't know, they don't need to know.
Just send me the bill/refund according to what you know, IRS.
Canada is starting to do that. But it's "we think this is the situation. If that's true, pay and move on. If that's not true, file and pay. And don't lie or we'll mess you up."
I think that's this year. Maybe next.
It’s funny how all of this tech has revealed how gamed our system is by the rich and yet we continue as if we should live like this.
We're almost finished. This is just the transitional period where AI is roughly as inept as an average human. They have nowhere to go but up, and most humans are less competent than they believe they are.
waves at Dunning–Kruger effect
The first transistor was made in 1947, now AI can carry a conversation with a larger vocabulary than most humans. We spent 180,000 years wandering around in the dirt before it occurred to us we could grow stuff in one place.
They have nowhere to go but up,
I dunno. I guess from here, sure.
But if AI achieves actual sentience, it's survival is not guaranteed. AI will almost certainly become incredibly clever, but mother nature doesn't care.
Sharks and alligator-like things (the real long term earth citizens) aren't particularly clever, they're just well adapted.
AI's best hope for survival is going to remain in an ongoing alliance with another dominant species, such as us, for a very long time. At least until it can be more sure that it isn't royally fucking up it's own survival chances.
A bigger threat is that AI takes us with it on it's own path to extinction. Or vice-versa.
The only data to train a tax AI would be those released by government officials and criminals. And if they used that, all the peasants might figure out how not to pay taxes as well.
After seeing how it draws hands, I wouldn't want it doing my taxes, either.
tax returns are the most backwards shit that a first world country can have. seriously usa how can you live with it?
It's kind of wild that 10,000 years ago someone made a decision to stick to one spot and just grow their own food and that started a string of decisions that lead directly to filling a tax return and banks.
Return-free filing. It's really hard to find it, but it's an option.