Leaderboard

Copied from Current Federal Tax Developements: https://www.currentfederaltaxdevelopments.com/blog/2024/7/12/new-jersey-committee-on-unauthorized-practice-of-law-issues-guidance-applicable-to-cpas-and-eas-who-prepare-and-file-fincen-beneficial-ownership-information-reports This ruling has some similarities to the Maryland AG ruling with some differences. For example this ruling only discusses the question of whether CPAs and EAs can assist their clients with BOI reporting. It will obviously take some more time for these questions to be resolved.

Real world, how would an AI bot handle this from a customer? "My witholding amounts are different when I run the month report to when I run a weekly payroll report." AI: ? (Me: What exactly are you referring to?) "When I add up the 3 months totals, it is different than the quarterly amount totaled." AI: ? (Me: Can you be specific? Which items? Without specific information, you are not giving me anything I can look into or discuss.) "Can you look at these and tell me why they don’t match the totals without being rude?" AI: ? (can it open a PDF and disseminate the contents as they relate to the perfectly vague inquiry?) (Me: If you are saying I was rude, I can say I was forced to be direct. I had to be because you were not giving anything useful to look at or consider. There are MANY items on reports, so stating "When I add up the 3 months totals, it is different than the quarterly amount totaled." is factually useless, after being asked to be specific in my first reply. Your examples do not even say which item or items you are concerned with / referring to, at least not that I can see. And your samples are for one month, looks like two payrolls, with nothing showing the "3 months" you referenced in your reply. If you do not reply with specific items to look at, I will have to go through them all, which will not be as fast of a reply. In other words, I would like to help, but I first have to know what you are referring to, specifically, not just something like "the numbers don't add up". Me: (After looking at the samples) The issue is checks were added or deleted, with a June date, after the two payroll reports were printed, but before the monthly report was printed. The old saying of "garbage in, garbage out" applies. Reprint the per payroll reports and compare, or better yet, print a payroll check listing for the month and verify no checks are missing, incorrect, or extra. The software has only the paycheck information at the time the report is prepared, top add together. --- AI would likely have been more drone like, with likely programmed in fluff, and at best, would have had to keep asking more questions to get to the needed information. Still would have likely received a complaint for not being helpful, since the customer was giving nothing to look at. Only someone who has heard this many times, and has an instinct of what to look at, (un)common sense, could have resolved this with the given information.

I could be blinded by age, but I see much of "AI" as a compilation (sometimes stolen, meaning without authorization) of the work of others. A good example is asking an AI bot to create program code. The "answer" likely comes from the work of others as mined from web sites, not from the work of the AI bot creator. This is somewhat an extension of the wayback machine by (IIRC) Internet Archive. Decades ago, I blocked that sort of mining from my site as they did not ask my permission to post my creations (my web sites). I now also block known AI mining bots, so my work does not end up generating profit for others without compensation. A recent article opined AI code snips are maybe 60-90% accurate and should not be relied on. Imagine if an AI data seller had successfully scanned in all books from the Library of Congress and a few large libraries instead of mining websites. IIRC there was at least one author who brought this up (found their work in an AI dataset) and blocked the use of their copyrighted material. The initial AI grabbing of websites is likely because the majority of site managers were or are not aware of how to protect their work and have a tough time paying for and/or proving infringement. Even this very site is public, and our answers to each other can be mined for AI purposes, unless Eric has implemented blocking the known AI search bots. A good use of AI is what Tesla is doing for their driving assist, as they can (paraphrasing) use the camera feed and drive track from all their vehicles to provide very updated nav and driving assist without having to hard code things like a wonky 5 way intersection near me (which will soon be replaced by two roundabouts with different numbers of entry/exits which my wife claims she will never use), or the couple of intersections I travel through with a signal in a strange place because of the blind curves. I remember when a new path to my house was made, I submitted it to google maps and the other backend nav companies, and it took months for the maps to be updated. Same for telling them there was a locked fire access/exit gate through a mobile home park which UPS drivers kept thinking was a clear path to us. Like what Tesla is doing, some sort of self created or learned bot to catch things like tax data entry errors could be handy but will never replace a veteran tax processor. Sounds like 1800 likely higher paid "makers" will be replaced by more marketing and support (low cost) workers, and the remaining makers will have no choice but to use AI (the work of others) to perform their newly increased workload.