And if I did my own taxes, I wouldn't know if I were in legal trouble until audit day as well!

If you hired a competent professional accountant, in all but the most contrived scenarios you wouldn't have to worry about legal trouble at all.

Except now, you can hire a competent professional accountant and discover on audit day that they got taken over by private equity, replaced 90% of the professionals doing work with AI and made a lot of money before the consequences become apparent.

This is such a fun timeline

Yes, but you're going to pay through the nose for the "wouldn't have to worry about legal trouble at all" (part of what you're paying for with professional services is a degree of protection from their fuckups).

So going back to apples-and-apples comparison, i.e. assuming that "spend a lot of money to get it done for you" is not on the table, I'd trust current SOTA LLM to do a typical person's taxes better than they themselves would.

TurboTax handles it fine with what are effectively a bunch of defined if-else statements.

I pay my accountant 500 USD to file my taxes. I don't consider that "through the nose" relative to my my inflated tech salary.

If a person is making a smaller income their tax situation is probably very simple, and can be handled by automated tools like TurboTax (as the sibling comment suggests).

I don't see a lot of value add from LLMs in this particular context. It's a situation where small mistakes can result in legal trouble or thousands of dollars of losses.