Tax preparers are using ai to help file your returns

REASONS TO BE WARY OF AI TAX PREP It is worth noting that other tax preparers are treading more cautiously when it comes to AI, including the AARP Foundation Tax-Aide program, which has

helped more than 80 million taxpayers fill out their returns for free since 1968. The free program does not use AI for tax prep. Meanwhile, for a gaggle of reasons, taxpayers should not seek

tax advice from Google Gemini,; Microsoft Copilot; or OpenAI’s ChatGPT. And independent of AI, you should be wary of tax advice given on social media, especially regarding tax credits,

different from tax deductions because they can reduce your tax bill by the exact amount of tax credit you can legally claim. AI bots may spit out information that sounds plausible but is out

of date, inaccurate or made up — wrong advice commonly known as hallucinations. You wouldn’t want an AI to go off the rails and fabricate an extra dependent or give filing instructions that

no longer apply. Even if you’re confident in the answers, sharing private information — financial or otherwise — with an AI isn’t a swell idea. When you train a bot with your own data, that

information could be exposed or leaked in the future, at least without proper guardrails. AI CAN PERSONALIZE RESPONSES The generative AI Intuit Assist feature in TurboTax includes what it

calls an accuracy check. The AI searches a customer’s return in real time to surface potential problems that may need to be addressed before the taxpayer moves to the next step. For example,

it may flag a missing lender name for a mortgage. AI Intuit Assist also can help personalize responses, perhaps by breaking down the sum TurboTax says you owe Uncle Sam or will get in a

refund. You might see an explanation along these lines: “As part of your itemized deductions, you are eligible for homeowner tax breaks. Specifically, you are able to deduct $6,771 for

mortgage interest.” ESTIMATE YOUR 2024 TAXES AARP’S TAX CALCULATOR can help you predict what you’re likely to pay for the 2024 tax year. Along the way, you can click prompts or type in

questions such as, “What tax breaks am I getting?” If things get too complicated, you can reach out to a human expert. Intuit Assist also better tailors the answers you’ll get from the

self-help digital assistant that’s been a part of TurboTax for several years, the company says. Deeper explanations are culled from Intuit’s proprietary large language model (LLM), a

database trained by tax professionals. What generative AI doesn’t do well yet is math. So Intuit is not using the AI for calculations, in part to avoid those hallucinations. Making sure tax

code outcomes are accurate is “always job number 1A for us,” says Keela Robison, vice president of product management for Intuit’s consumer group. “We don’t feel that generative AI is at a

point yet where it can do that.”