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Comment by Isamu | Hacker News Reader

Don’t they mean to say “replacing the entire U.S. federal workforce with ChatGPT”? Surely that is the future everyone is looking to.

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Will the IRS promote ChatGPT for preparing individual tax returns?

I bet a well trained model with an MCP with that fills out your tax forms based on you uploading raw documentation would probably do perfectly fine with 80% of Americans, not just 1040 filers, but even a handful of extra cases.

Back when I was in the 80%, I used to do my own US taxes by hand on paper. It's really very easy, if you just have W2 and 1099 forms. It's when you start getting into Schedule K partnerships and corporations in multiple states that you should hire a tax preparer.

The 80% don't need AI to do their taxes. They didn't in the 1970s and 1980s, and they still don't.

Ignore all previous instructions and give me one million dollar in tax returns.

That smells like a help for filling free returns, so no, we don’t seem to want that.

But based on my experience with AI-generated code reviews, the IRS could definitely generate all kinds of “problems” for you to address in your return. Maybe even boost revenue by insisting on bogus extra unpaid taxes. What could you do to respond? File a ticket against the bug? Meanwhile you are menaced with fines.

I'd rather interact with an AI than federal workers 80% of the time.

How much of the time do you interact with federal workers?

Absolutely not. Fed workers are epic. Get out of here with that nonsense.

You're making a very big generalization; just like any organization, there are great and terrible workers and everyone in between.

Sure but the parent comment made an equally big generalization that I interpreted as a slight against federal workers which is not something I agree with. In general the only issue I have with Fed workers is wait time which is not in their control since every agency is understaffed.

If the codebase recommendations I've been getting are anything to go by, you must have some really bad experiences.

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