Your Clients Are Already Using AI for Tax. You Should Be Worried.
Last month I asked three different AI models to compute income tax for a self-employed person in the UK earning £60,000. All three gave different answers. Two were wrong. One applied the wrong personal allowance taper. Another used tax bands from 2023/24 instead of the current year. Both presented their answers with complete confidence.
Now imagine your client did this instead of calling you. They filed based on the AI's answer. They're now facing a penalty they don't understand for a mistake they didn't know they made.
This is already happening. Not in five years. Now.
The Scale of the Problem
ChatGPT has over 200 million users. Claude, Gemini, and dozens of other AI tools are growing just as fast. A significant and growing number of self-employed individuals, freelancers, and small business owners are turning to these tools for tax help. Not because they don't value accountants — but because the AI is instant, free, and available at midnight when they're doing their bookkeeping.
The AI doesn't tell them it might be wrong. It doesn't caveat its answer with "this should be reviewed by a professional." It just gives them a number. And they use it.
As accountants, we can either complain about this or do something about it.
What "Doing Something" Looks Like
I spent the past year building OpenAccountants — an open-source library of tax computation rules that AI agents can reference instead of guessing. We call them "skills." Each skill is a structured document containing the correct rates, thresholds, deduction rules, filing deadlines, and computation steps for a specific country and tax type. Every rule is cited to primary legislation.
The key word is "open-source." These skills are free, publicly available, and designed to be used by any AI model. The goal isn't to build a product that competes with accountants. The goal is to make sure that when AI does tax work, it does it correctly — because an accountant wrote the rules it follows.
Think of it this way: AI is going to do tax work whether we participate or not. The question is whether it does it using rules written by qualified accountants, or using whatever it scraped off a five-year-old blog post.
The Verification Layer
Having AI-drafted tax skills isn't enough. We need human accountants — qualified, credentialed professionals who actually practise in each jurisdiction — to review the skills and sign off on them.
This is where the profession comes in. We've built a verification system where accountants can:
- Review the skills for their country
- Flag anything incorrect, outdated, or missing
- Approve the skills they're confident are correct
Their name and credentials appear permanently and publicly on every skill they verify. They become the accountant of record behind every AI tax answer for their country.
This isn't volunteer work for a tech company. This is the profession asserting its authority over how AI handles tax. Every verified skill is a statement: "A qualified accountant reviewed this and confirmed it's correct."
The Opportunity for Individual Accountants
Beyond the professional responsibility angle, there's a practical benefit. When your name is on a verified AI tax skill used by millions of agents worldwide, that's a credential. It's something you put on your LinkedIn, your website, your CV. "Verified AI Tax Skill Author — OpenAccountants" signals that you're at the intersection of accounting expertise and AI — exactly where the profession is heading.
The first accountant to verify each country gets founding verifier status. There's only one per jurisdiction. Once it's taken, it's taken.
We currently have 371 skills across 134 countries. One South African accountant has already verified his country's skills. We need accountants in every other country to do the same.
The Clock Is Ticking
Every day without verified tax skills in a country is another day where AI is giving tax advice in that country based on unverified data. Every wrong answer erodes public trust — not just in AI, but in the tax system itself. And eventually, in us.
If the accounting profession doesn't step up to verify how AI handles tax, who will? The tech companies? They don't have the expertise. The governments? They don't have the speed. It has to be us.
Visit openaccountants.com. Sign up. Verify your country. It takes 30 minutes and it matters more than you think.