Tax Experts Warn Against Using AI Chatbots for Tax Preparation Despite Industry Push

Think AI Can Do Your Taxes? The IRS Might Disagree

There's just one small problem. The Internal Revenue Service expects financial data to be accurate, not just "close enough." I asked some tax experts whether you should have a general-purpose AI chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity do your taxes for you. The answer was clear. "I don't recommend that at all," said Travis Thompson, a tax attorney and director in the business and finance group at the firm Fennemore. "My advice would be no," said Sterling Raskie, senior lecturer of finance at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Tax season makes everyone look for shortcuts. Federal income tax returns are nightmarish and complicated -- and that's exactly what makes them unsuited for a chatbot. AI is very good at sounding right even when it's wrong. Still, if you can't afford to hire a trusted, trained human to help with your taxes, there are some things generative AI can be useful for during tax season. The capabilities of a generative AI model are impressive. But let's remember that, at their core, these educated-guess machines are simply finding patterns and offering plausible results. They can't distinguish approximation from the truth. The numbers on your tax forms are expected to be correct, not simply ballpark. That's why doing your taxes is such a pain, and also why we're not supposed to take shortcuts. Mistakes can be costly to your refund, or you could face expensive repayments and fines, or worse. "It's important to keep in mind that if an AI chatbot provides incorrect guidance and a person uses it to file an incorrect tax return, they (the person) are responsible for infractions or violations, which could include penalties, interest, and lost refunds," said Chris Linderwell, vice president of consumer tax products at H&R Block. Some tax-specific AI tools are trained on and rely specifically on information about the tax code. But the generic one you use for menu planning or travel research is not one of those. Read more: Tax Season 2026: Which Documents and Info Do You Need to File Income Taxes? Highly personal information, such as your Social Security number and financial statements, should be kept safe -- or at least as safe as possible in today's digital world, where data collection through email and social media is ubiquitous, and data breaches are common. Chatbots manage data in the cloud, which is just a computer owned by a private company. They have "memory" features that can regurgitate information in unexpected ways. You may find yourself asking a totally unrelated question down the line and get a response that pulls from data in your tax documents. You probably don't want that. Internet privacy risks already run deep, but chatbots are especially known to compromise and leak sensitive information. Grok, the chatbot created by Elon Musk's xAI, was recently found to be revealing people's personal information to other users. Be very careful about giving AI anything you want to keep private, like your tax information. "You don't want those numbers floating around the internet," Thompson said. Though you shouldn't trust a large language model to fill out your tax forms, you can still use one as a beefed-up search engine for finding information, i.e., for educational purposes. Just make sure you verify its accuracy before relying on it. I asked a representative from OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, whether the chatbot is something taxpayers should use for filing. ChatGPT can't access bank accounts, nor can it act as a licensed financial professional, lawyer, or accountant. "You should always review the ChatGPT output since it is not a replacement for a licensed professional," the OpenAI rep said. But it can help with a basic gut-check or can point you in the right direction, like translating tax terms, preparing checklists or providing questions to ask your accountant. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) For example, AI can help you decide what to discuss with a tax pro, which documents you'll need to process or even identify tax situations you might not have realized. What should you know if you made money from crypto? What's the difference between married filing jointly and head of household? Also, keep in mind that the quality of an AI answer doesn't depend solely on the model, but also on how you ask the question. And repeating the same question multiple times may generate different answers, especially if you express an opinion or a tilt in how you ask (AI sycophancy is real). If outside links are provided in the results from AI, fact-check the findings against the original source, and make sure that the source is reputable. Remember: You don't know what you don't know. "The less and less expertise you have in that field, the less and less you can trust those programs," Thompson said. "It doesn't just depend on what the program is saying; it depends on what the user is asking the program to say." Experts underline the importance of having a "human in the loop" for AI systems, whether they're writing LinkedIn posts or handling critical personal information. Mistakes are the fault of the person who decided to go with the AI's work, not the technology itself. Don't blame the calculator if you did the math wrong. Someone with judgment and accountability should make the final call. When it comes to a simple tax return, you could be that person. Raskie said if you have a basic return and you trust yourself to be thorough and double-check the numbers, you should be able to file on your own. "Basic return" generally means you only earn W-2 income and take the standard deduction -- no complex investments, itemized deductions or freelance work. You could fill out the forms yourself, following step-by-step instructions through the IRS's free fillable online forms, or by using a free file software option. H&R Block online uses AI to help automate your filing by reviewing receipts and uploaded documents to prefill fields on your behalf. AI, in this sense, is a time-saver. But ultimately, you have to make sure the information is accurate. If you need help from a tax professional, most DIY tax software, including H&R Block and TurboTax, offer the option to have a human professional review and file on your behalf for a fee or an upgrade. Many at-home tax software programs offer defense services in the event of an audit or audit risk assessments before you file -- but for an extra cost. H&R Block says it will give audit representation and even financial reimbursement (if they made the error). "If you have any anxiety whatsoever, it's worth its weight in gold to hire a licensed tax preparer professional to do your returns, primarily a CPA or what's called an enrolled agent," Thompson said. If you solicit the help of a trusted licensed professional, you might be able to turn to them if there's a mistake on your return. You'll still be responsible for paying the government what you owe, but you may be able to hold a tax preparer accountable in cases of fraud or some serious mistakes. If you decide to trust a chatbot to do your tax return, be ready for an IRS audit. And don't expect to blame AI.

xAI Exec Says Have Grok Check Your Taxes! Tax Experts Say Do Not Do That!

With about a month left until the April 15 deadline for filing taxes, you may be tempted to pawn off the task onto an AI chatbot. After all, companies keep saying they are more capable than ever of autonomously handling tasks like coding apps or, you know, bombing military targets. Surely, they can handle navigating the American tax code...right? James Burnham, xAI's General Counsel and head of law and government, sure thinks so. In a post on X, he told his followers, "Doublecheck your taxes with @Grok. A friend had Grok doublecheck TurboTax and it increased her tax refund by $1400. That covers nearly four years of Grok Premium!" (He later edited the post to add, "Disclaimer: This/Grok is not tax advice so always confirm yourself too.") Setting aside the fact that you can absolutely find better things to do with your money than getting nearly a half-decade's worth of access to the MechaHitler machine, and the fact that Burnham isn't even citing his own experience, just passing on the account of a friend, there's a logic to assuming a chatbot can help you with taxes. Even tax giants like H&R Block have introduced AI assistants designed to tackle tax-related questions. But that doesn't mean you should just pass your W2 or 1099s over to Grok or your chatbot of choice and let them fill out the forms for you. In fact, tax experts would really rather you not do thisâ€"after all, they're probably the ones who are going to have to help you roll back all the mistakes. "I haven't personally used Grok to prepare or review tax returns, and I wouldn't advise taxpayers to [try it], especially using a general-purpose chatbot as a tax reviewer," Joel Salas, owner of Elevated Tax Strategies, told Gizmodo. "Practically speaking, that's just not a good idea." There are several reasons not to trust the Groks of the world to roleplay as your Certified Public Accountant. The first is accuracy. The New York Times put multiple chatbots through the paces of filing taxes, handing them tax situations prepared as training materials by tax preparation company TaxSlayer. It found that the chatbots miscalculated refunds and amounts owed to the IRS by an average of more than $2,000. So sure, Grok might have saved Burnham's friend $1,400 on paper, but who knows if it arrived at that number because it found some hidden exemptions or because it just made stuff up and entered numbers incorrectly. Those findings are backed up by other tests, too. TaxCalcBench, a benchmarking test designed to evaluate an AI model's ability to calculate tax returns, found that most options are wildly insufficient, with most failing to even crack 50% accuracy across a full return. "Tax preparation in particular requires purpose-built systems designed for accuracy, compliance, reliability, and security," a spokesperson for tax and finance software giant Intuit told Gizmodo. "Consumers are looking for confidence and peace of mind in moments that carry real financial liability. While a general-purpose LLM may provide broad tax information, it is not specifically trained or validated to prepare accurate tax returns across complex federal and state scenarios." The second reason not to use a bot to do your taxes, Salas said, is that it's just irrational to trust your average chatbot with the type of sensitive personal information that is contained in your tax documents. "Honestly, it hasn't been around long enough for us to trust these companies with that type of data. If you review any of their terms and conditions and fully understand them, you'll realize you're playing a bit of Russian roulette with your data," he said. "Your data can be used for other purposes if you do not opt out or take certain actions." Last year, researchers at Stanford analyzed privacy policies of major AI chatbots and found that many of the leading US companies feed user inputs back into their models to improve their capabilities. Companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, require users to manually opt out of allowing their conversations to be used for training purposes. Meta previously allowed users to browse other people's prompts and conversations with its chatbot, revealing medical, legal, and other sensitive information. A similar situation happened with xAI, which temporarily made user conversations with Grok publicly visible and searchable. It's also no secret that xAI and its founder, Elon Musk, have been after taxpayer data for a while now. The Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency reportedly sought to access sensitive taxpayer data at the IRS last year. It'd certainly make their lives much easier if people just willingly handed that information over, which Musk encouraged them to do, stating on Twitter, "Grok can help with your taxes." If you do want to use AI to help with filing your taxes, there are tools out there that are better suited than Grok. Salas pointed to the tool Taxbox, which he said can be used as a "tax assistant or tutor" to better understand what different documents mean and how to navigate the filing system. He even said that you can use a chatbot to do things like build a checklist of common tax mistakes or ask some tax basics as you go through the filing process. Just don't give them your actual documents. "The risk arises when copying and pasting W-2s, 1099s, or draft returns directly into the internet bot and asking it to check them," Salas said. "The bot can not only be confidently wrong, but you are also relinquishing personal data." When it comes to actually filing, just stick to the software designed specifically for the task. "The actual form logic, calculation, and e-file validation are built into the tax software. They're not built into the chatbot," Salas said. And if you end up getting audited, your chatbot isn't going to be able to help you. Intuit, which obviously has its own motivations for driving consumers to its services, offered similar advice. "General large language models can be helpful tools for general education and guidance, including answering high-level financial or tax questions," a spokesperson said. But, they specified, "AI can absolutely play a valuable role in financial decision-making, but when it comes to high-stakes matters like taxes, consumers should look for solutions that are purpose-built, secure, and designed to deliver accuracy at scale." And if you don't believe the experts, you can always ask Grok. When asked on Twitter about its ability to file taxes, the chatbot told users, "I'm not a licensed tax pro or official software, so noâ€"don't 'do' your taxes solely with me." You heard the bot.