Chrom

This guy set up an alert for my name. He's sitting there waiting for me to get audited so he can celebrate. That's how threatened these people are. The CPA crowd on X might not be representative of all CPAs but holy shit the ones I interact with here seem to think they're brain surgeons. You are putting numbers in boxes and adding them up. You collect receipts and documents from people, you type them into the right fields in the right forms, and you make sure the math works out. Yes there is real value in knowing a lot of tax situations. Years of pattern recognition, knowing which deductions hold up, knowing when something smells wrong. I'm not dismissing that. That part is genuinely valuable. But that part is like 10% of the work. The other 90% is tedious data aggregation into the correct forms and if you cannot see that this is incredibly automatable then I don't know what to tell you. The smart accountants get this. They'll adapt. They'll use the new tools to apply their actual judgment across way more clients with way less grunt work. They'll make more money than they do now. Good for them. But people like this fellow who are fantasizing about me in tax court because I dared to suggest that maybe a human being can do their own taxes with AI assistance. Not cooked. Doomed. "You couldn't possibly understand what I do" is the last thing every automatable profession says before it gets automated.

The first time I used a CPA, he was extremely efficient and extremely wrong. It was a large company. They took care of everything for me. I felt amazing. Years later, I understood what a crappy job they did: They did almost nothing to help me save money. As my taxes became more complex, I started trusting CPA and tax preparer experts less and less. I quickly realized that they provide very good service for the 95% of people out there, but as soon as your situation becomes more complex, their services are less valuable. Right now, I'm too rich for the CPA I can afford, and too poor for the CPA I need. This year, I filled out my taxes using a combination of Claude (for the most part) and ChatGPT. For reference, I have a solid understanding of tax law, and I've always been involved in my taxes. I'm also not uneducated. I used TurboTax's consulting service to ask complex questions beyond my knowledge and to fact-check Claude's suggestions. Most of the time, the human experts were clueless and didn't know that something we did was even possible or lawful. Most experts had to ask me "to return my call later" so they had time to read more about the topic. Claude was right every single time. This was eye-opening for me. By the way, I also found a mistake in my 2024 return. Claude found out that I wasn't reporting a backdoor Roth IRA contribution correctly. I had to file an amended return for 2024, and the IRS owes me $2,562. To all the people saying this is just bro science and that you should trust your CPA, I say: Have fun with it. Instead: • Claude did 99.9% of the work with my help • I used human experts to validate some of that work • I paid the TurboTax Audit Defense service to have them represent me in the event of an audit I know this might be fringe today, but more and more people will start moving this way. CPAs will have to compete now to win our business back.