AI & Taxes

Many of us in the United States have a lovehate relationship with April. Days are warming, gardens are awakening, spring is springing, and taxes are due. For more than a decade, the Internal Revenue Service, the US government agency responsible for tax collection, has had an AI Lab. This article looks at some IRS AI systems in production and field testing, as well as some future directions for AI at the IRS. In keeping with the tax theme, I’ll also look at Kiplinger TaxCnt, a tax-preparation program for individual US tax returns. (To long-time AI watchers, this program started as AskDan in the mid-eighties.) In a recent review of this year’s tax software, Business Week gave TaxCut top rating.l Look under the covers of this off-the-shelf package, and you’ll see an expert system--one of the most widely used expert systems in the world.