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TaxCalcBench: An open source eval for testing if AI can file taxes

TaxCalcBench is an open-source evaluation benchmark designed to test whether AI systems can accurately prepare and file tax returns, providing a standardized way to assess AI tax filing capabilities.

Background

TaxCalcBench is an open-source benchmark (evaluation framework) from Column Tax, a US tax-preparation startup. It tests whether AI models can correctly prepare basic federal tax returns by providing W-2s, 1099s, and other common forms, then checking the resulting 1040 against ground-truth answers. The project is a direct response to claims that large language models (LLMs) are ready to replace human tax preparers — early results show most models fail even simple cases. This matters because tax filing is a high-stakes, regulation-heavy domain where errors carry real consequences, and the benchmark reveals how far AI is from being reliable for this task.

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