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points by waiwai933 1 day ago | 0 comments
I 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.)

[–] coffeebeqn 1 day ago
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
[–] aprilthird2021 1 day ago
According to these benchmarks. It's not there yet
[–] CalRobert 1 day ago
form 5471?
[–] coffeebeqn 10 hours ago
Among a few others yes
[–] ivanjermakov 1 day ago
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.
[–] redanddead 1 day ago
you were consulted by an LLM?
[–] sanex 1 day ago
He said he's a foreigner, almost certainly a mistranslation.
[–] ivanjermakov 1 day ago
Embarrassing...
[–] arpinum 1 day ago
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.

[–] markoman 1 day ago
So, GPT Sol outputted tax return PDFs that you were able to submit to the IRS? (I'd imagine that you couldn't directly e-file like you could from TurboTax.)
[–] arpinum 1 day ago
Correct, it first did it in a spreadsheet, then filled out 59 pages of returns and supplement forms and I printed and posted it. It also filed my FBAR.
[–] waiwai933 1 day ago
I don't know that I'd trust it with an FBAR given it's an interactive PDF myself, but good to hear that it was able to do it - maybe I'll get fed up doing the FBAR manually one year and trust an agent to do so.
[–] arpinum 20 hours ago
They changed the FBAR page recently, no longer an interactive PDF.
[–] waiwai933 13 hours ago
Ah looks like there's both the PDF and online option; I filed with the PDF version because you can save your history but I guess if Claude can navigate and fill in the online option then I have less quibble about being able to keep progress. Thanks!
[–] fn-mote 1 day ago
Amazing story!! Honestly, thanks for sharing so completely.
[–] quixoticelixer- 1 day ago
Is it unusual for Americans to spend that much on tax returns?
[–] alemanek 1 day ago
Yeah for individual tax preparation that is pretty high. Most people get away with filing for $20-150. I used to have a CPA do my consulting business, tiny 1 person company, and personal taxes for $500.

I no longer do consulting on the side so I just use online tax software. It is about $150 but I do that more out of laziness as it integrates with my brokerage and payroll company to import everything automatically. Also I have carry forward losses and such that it already knows about.

Most people’s taxes are simpler than mine but I am sure there are lots of folks here with much more complex tax situations

[–] arpinum 20 hours ago
I am not a normal case because I don't live in USA. The USA government estimates 50-80 hours to complete all my forms.

I have foreign income and foreign businesses, my partner has foreign income from two countries. The tax law is then based on tax treaties, most tax preparers do not have sufficient knowledge to complete a return, and tax software doesn't handle these cases.

The tax treaties are not clear, tax professionals will disagree on interpretation, and tax benefits in one country will not apply to another.

Then there is a thing called AMT, alternative minimum tax, which is a second way to calculate your taxes that you need to submit as well.

[–] aprilthird2021 1 day ago
It's unusual to spend that much even for a small business tax returns except maybe in major cities
[–] matwood 1 day ago
> 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.

[–] sharts 1 day ago
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.

[–] persedes 1 day ago
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.

[–] waiwai933 1 day ago
I appreciate the recommendation, but as it happens I have already solved the estimated issue (mostly by just preparing a full return with estimated next year's figures, which while time-heavy is going to be more accurate). And for what it's worth, I suspect it wouldn't work for me - cross-border is extraordinarily complicated because of the tax treaties (indeed there is a dedicated IRS form to disclose the effect and rationale of any treaty based position), and given there is no obvious note on the documentation for it that there is cross-border support I doubt there is.

(And as I said to another commenter, I think it would be advisable in this thread for people to expressly acknowledge or disclaim any interest in or prior experience with any particular product)

[–] ajhit406 1 day ago
check out https://www.multiplierholdings.com/

it's the most ai-native tax experience for US citizens abroad

[–] waiwai933 1 day ago
Are you saying I should use this (or it looks like one of their portfolio companies) as my return preparer, or as a replacement for Claude my return-checker? If the former, I would want to know why I should trust it; if the latter, I would want to know why I should pay for their services given I am already playing Anthropic for a subscription plan anyway.

(It would also help to know if you had a financial interest in or prior experience with this company)