For most of history, tax knowledge has been stored in two places: inside the heads of trained professionals, and inside documents that only those professionals could navigate. That scarcity is the foundation the whole profession was built on. You paid an accountant because the knowledge was hard to get and harder to apply.

That foundation is shifting under our feet. Not because the knowledge is becoming worthless — but because it's becoming readable by machines. And once tax rules are open and machine-readable, a lot of things that felt permanent stop being permanent.

"Accounting-as-code"

In software, there's a phrase: infrastructure-as-code. Instead of an expert manually configuring servers, you write the configuration down in a structured, versioned, reviewable form — and then any number of machines apply it correctly, every time.

Tax is heading toward its own version of that. Call it accounting-as-code: the rules that govern how people and businesses are taxed, written down in a structured form a machine can read and apply, versioned as the law changes, and reviewed by qualified humans the way code is reviewed before it ships.

When tax logic lives as code rather than as folklore, a few things follow almost automatically. Answers become consistent instead of dependent on which professional you happened to reach. Updates propagate the moment a rule changes, instead of lagging a year behind in someone's memory. And the reasoning becomes inspectable — you can see why an answer is what it is, traced back to the rule it came from.

The accountant's role gets bigger, not smaller

The instinct is to read all this as a threat to accountants. I think that's exactly backwards.

When tax knowledge was scarce, an accountant's time was rationed one client at a time. The expertise was real, but it didn't scale — there are only so many hours in a year. Machine-readable, human-verified rules change the unit of work. Instead of applying your judgement to one return at a time, you apply it once to a rule — and that judgement then stands behind every answer the rule produces, for everyone, everywhere.

The accountant stops being the bottleneck and becomes the authority. The machine does the applying. The human does the deciding, the reviewing, and the standing-behind. That's a higher-leverage job than the one most accountants have today, and a more interesting one.

The next big accounting firm won't look like a firm

If the rules are open and the application is automated, the value concentrates in two places: the quality of judgement behind the rules, and the trust attached to the people who verified them.

That points to a different shape of organisation than the traditional firm — one built less around billable hours and more around a body of verified knowledge that works while everyone sleeps, with named professionals standing behind it. Fewer hours sold, more correctness deployed. The firm of the next decade may look more like an open standard with experts attached than a building full of timesheets.

Why open matters

You could imagine all of this happening in a closed, proprietary way — one company owning the machine-readable tax code and renting it out. I think that's the wrong outcome, and not just on principle.

Tax governs everyone. The rules that decide what you owe shouldn't sit behind one company's paywall, readable only by one company's product. If machines are going to read the tax code on behalf of billions of people, the version they read should be open — inspectable, correctable, and usable by any tool — and the trust layer on top of it should be public, with real professionals' names attached to what they verified.

Open keeps it honest. Verification keeps it correct. Together they're the only combination I'd trust to sit underneath the world's tax answers.

We're already building it

None of this is a far-future prediction I'm waiting on. It's the thing we're constructing now — an open library of tax skills, reviewed and signed off by practising accountants across the world, readable by any AI agent.

The rules are becoming machine-readable whether the profession leads it or not. The choice in front of us is only whether they're open and verified — or closed and guessed. I know which world I'd rather be taxed in.

If you're an accountant who wants to help build the open one, start here.