HACKER Q&A
📣 brianhorakh

Anybody using AI tools for taxes this year?


Yay! it's US tax season again.

I'm a US citizen who has moved out of the US but still needs to pay/file taxes (despite living abroad for almost a decade, having left immediately after Trump 45 was elected).

I have US investments, mortgages, bank accounts, coinbase, etc. and I find downloading and auditing each of them tedious and a waste of time each year. Like many here I have mild ADHD and when that is coupled with my feelings on the US autocracy it triggers depression. The toil of performing US taxes creates an intense emotional pain -- and like any dev/ops person I want to find a way to automate. I thought this would get easier as the years passed but it's actually gotten progressively worse each year.

Being offshore I experience wildly different targeted advertising and have no friends/social group (beyond HN) to seek advice from.

What (if any) open-source AI tools exist to speed up parsing the data, generation of reports etc. I'd prefer CLI and OSS tools that don't require subscriptions. CLI/TUI preferred.

Examples might be converting PDF's to CSV using OSS, but what else (ex: categorization, expenses, summaries), agentic workflows, etc?

Due to complexities of being offshore I use an accountant who specializes in ex-pat. I don't think software like quicken will be helpful (please correct me if I'm wrong).

Others in similar circumstances what tools do you do to make managing US financial accounts & taxes obligations less tedious/painful?


  👤 LinuxBender Accepted Answer ✓
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.

👤 dinkumthinkum
Have you ever thought of just hiring an Enrolled Agent to do it for you and be done with it. Talking about the “autocracy” and all that, I feel like you might just be way overthinking this. It’s not that expensive if you’re making all this money.