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by LinuxBender 517 days ago
I can only speak for myself but I would never trust LLM's to do anything that required accuracy or understanding the nuances and ever changing details of the US Tax Code. If I were an ex-pat I would send all my documents to a CPA in the US to process and file on my behalf.
1 comments

To be clear: Not looking for an LLM to give tax advice (very cringe!) .. although it might be entertaining.

Yes, I do have an expat focused CPA based in the US who ultimately calculates & e-files for me, and however she has a questionaire and still requires me to prepare a summary.

She doesn't correlation transactions to acocunt codes which tend to be very repetitive. In my case many recurring & usage charges on different cards, etc. that need to be categorized, summarized.

As a consultant I've designed and implemented several big data systems which use various ML OCR in workflows. I'm referring to the toil of converting statements from PDF & classifying the receipts.

I'm not especially worried about an LLM hallucinating because I can/could objectively check to make sure the math adds up. If it gets a few categorized incorrectly then it's not the end of the world because mistakes happen -- even with humans. I will still need to audit it at the end.

Even a system which could get 95% correct would potentially reduce my toil from a week+ of emotional pain to a few hours. I wager a model with a fresh context performing a single line item with examples would outperform a human.

This is not something I necessarily need to solve this year .. for now I'm going to have to pay taxes every year until I decide to renounce my US citizenship and that also requires liquidating retirement accounts etc. with severe penalties & horrible tax implications.

I'm not super old, so there is a range let's say 1-50+ years ahead of me (given my age, when I will die) so an effect of automation could be to add a week a year could potentially give me a net result of an entire year. It might also have ancillary benefits of reducing both stress and inflammation, lowering cortisol, etc.