AI assistant for tax questions and filing support

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) runs a virtual chatbot called Charlie that gives automated answers to frequently asked tax and benefit questions, alongside human staffed call centres. In an October 2025 report to Parliament, Auditor General Karen Hogan found that CRA call centre agents answered only 17 per cent of individual tax questions accurately over a four month test, and that the agency prioritized adherence to staff shift schedules over the accuracy of the information given to callers.

Hogan's report said taxpayers were more likely to get an accurate response from Charlie than from a human agent. CRA assistant commissioner Melanie Serjak told a parliamentary committee the agency would introduce more standardized training and "automation" to improve agents' accuracy. Neither the report nor the coverage of it seen for this record states Charlie's own accuracy rate, when Charlie was introduced, or how many taxpayers use it.

H&R Block launched AI Tax Assist in December 2023, a generative AI experience built on Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service that lets DIY online and, later, desktop software customers ask open questions about tax forms, deductions, credits, tax law changes and the filing process at no extra charge, with the company's own tax professionals available if a client wants a human instead.

H&R Block says the assistant is built on content from its The Tax Institute and the experience of more than 60,000 tax professionals rather than generating unchecked answers. By March 2026 the company reported that client usage of AI Tax Assist had grown 152% since launch, with 6.45 million client messages delivered to date and 1.91 million messages that tax season alone, an 85% year on year increase, with responses delivered in an average of 2.2 seconds.

The company separately introduced Sidekick, a similar AI assistant for its own tax professionals rather than customers.

The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) unveiled a WhatsApp based tax filing service built on an AI chatbot it calls Shuru, reachable on the authority's official WhatsApp number. Taxpayers can pull up their pre filled details, file returns, generate eTIMS invoices and obtain compliance certificates through the conversation, without logging into the iTax web portal. KRA frames the launch as part of a wider push to reach taxpayers, including small traders and individuals, outside its conventional digital filing channels.

HMRC's digital assistant answers tax questions typed in plain language, matching them to intents with natural language understanding and replying with non personalised answers that link to GOV.UK guidance. It covers 60 of HMRC's more than 120 taxes, asks the user to choose between likely meanings when unsure, and needs no login. Complex questions escalate to webchat with a human adviser, who sees the whole prior conversation and only continues after identity and verification checks.

Saudi Arabia's Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority launched Ask Ziyad, a generative AI assistant that answers zakat, tax and customs questions from a database of more than 130 of the authority's own guidelines, for taxpayers, importers, exporters, investors, travellers and business owners. It answers in audio or text on the ZATCA website. ZATCA positions it as part of a wider push to raise compliance and make services easier to use under Saudi Arabia's digital transformation programme.

Since 2021 the IRS has put intent based voice bots on many toll free lines: payment plans and balance due (with authentication so taxpayers can set up or change a payment plan), Where's My Refund and amended return status, notice clarifications, Economic Impact Payments and the Advance Child Tax Credit. On IRS.gov, chatbots answer FAQs on refunds, identity theft, payments and relief. The inventory stresses that answers are not generated: the model classifies the question and returns content approved by the business owner, or routes the call to a live assistor.

The IRS Linguistic Policy, Tools and Services team uses a cloud machine translation application on AWS, with the IRS Publication 850 glossary of English and Spanish tax terms, to translate text and files between English and Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese and speed up responses to taxpayers. Separately, staff use SYSTRAN neural translation, augmented with a domain dictionary and translation memories, to triage non English documents for relevance to case work and as a starting point for manual translation. Both appear in the federal AI inventory as in operation.

ClearTax, an Indian online tax filing platform, built a generative AI agent on WhatsApp, using Azure OpenAI models, for low income and blue collar workers who have tax deducted at source from their income but rarely file a return, and so miss refunds and lack the income proof lenders ask for. The agent explains taxes and filing, walks users through the filing workflow and supports nine Indian vernacular languages. It is a private filing service, not a tax authority channel.

Skatteverket, the Swedish Tax Agency, launched its chatbot "Skatti" in May 2018 to answer the public's general questions about income tax returns and national registration, built on the Boost.ai conversational AI platform and trained by the agency's own staff.

A trade press interview with the agency's development strategist and AI trainer, published in 2022, reports that Skatti handles around 500,000 customer conversations a year with just over two questions per conversation, and that in a monthly sample of one in ten conversations roughly 90 percent of customers get a useful answer, such as a correct reply or a relevant link.

Customer surveys cited in the same article found that more than 80 percent of customers felt they had received a good enough answer and did not need to contact Skatteverket another way.

Spain's tax agency, the Agencia Tributaria, built a virtual assistant on IBM Watson Conversation so that accounting and finance professionals at large companies could ask natural language questions, around the clock, about the Immediate Supply of Information (SII), the VAT reporting regime that requires electronic invoice records within four days. It was the first time the Spanish administration used AI to support taxpayers with their tax obligations. The assistant was trained jointly by IBM and the agency's own experts on about 375 questions and answers, and by the time of the announcement it covered the whole SII process rather than only the original four topic areas.