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Comment by intenex | Hacker News Reader

That's a good point - there's an argument to be made that I'm closer to the metal in a sense of understanding every part of the transaction vs abstracting it away fully to a human agent to handle each part themselves.

It's the same with my taxes - this year I had Astra fully audit my tax returns vs just blindly trusting my CPA as I had in the past, and it both identified and thoroughly explained to me several discrepancies and filing nuances that I never before would have ever learned about.

I think the reality is such that today most people also don't learn or do that much and just abstract things away to more specialized humans at exorbitantly higher price points.

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I'm curious, did you end up going back to your accountantant with questions based on that? How did it go?

Now I want to do the same thing.

Went phenomenally well for me! They were apologetic, changed everything they got wrong and added some forms they missed and filed and I felt simultaneously way more assured about the process and also way more concerned about the glaring errors they missed and probably did also in the past that I just didn't notice lol (they even spelled my name wrong lmao, used my short nickname and missed my middle initial vs my full name despite having filed my taxes correctly last year with my full proper name)

OTOH I have another friend who sent so many corrections to his CPA his CPA sent him a pissed off reply telling him basically never to do that again so ymmv lmao

Did you redact your ssn and PII info before feeding it to Claude? What are the implications for it seeing your PII by accident? Can it ever get leaked?

I want to know this too. I'm super wary of feeding my tax returns to an LLM.

I did the same with my taxes that I needed to file in Oct after getting extension in April. Added the return and all supporting docs to a Claude project. Found 2 big issues and 4 smaller ones, all legit. Basis and depreciation calc for two rental properties were way off. Also IRA basis stuff was wrong those two were heavily in my favor to correct. Felt a little bad peppering the accountant with issues, but he was apologetic and corrected. This is a no brainer use case for me going forward.

I always point people to this:

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2022/Nov/do-you-trust-your-tax-...

I'm not in the least bit surprised it found problems. I don't think one even needs a frontier model.

I hired a tax professional once. I also did my own taxes because I wanted to validate the first time experience and found many major things wrong.

Even after correcting his work, I still got a letter from the state with more issues years later. Never again.

i did this with opus5.5 this year and it caught an 8000$ mistake. Obviously i should find a new CPA, but i have found it incredibly helpful. One downside is that it will likely also flag a bunch of "by the book" libilities to how your filing that I'm pretty sure most CPA would let slide.

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