As a former employee of a company that was essentially trying to build the "turbo tax for accountants", we had over 200 accounts, 50+ software engineers, and st

As a former employee of a company that was essentially trying to build the "turbo tax for accountants", we had over 200 accounts, 50+ software engineers, and still barely scratched the surface. (The project eventually shut down after burning through 25 million). The problem is that tax code is very very ugly. We had entire teams thar would specialize in a specific tax area. Even if you could codify everything, the amount things change from year to year is insane. Most accountants deal with a very small subset of tax law, and they send the rest off to specialist teams, like a big-4 accountant firm where a lots of things are done by hand or older archaic software that costs a lot of money. (Comparative to turbo tax). Even the small subset of tax law most people deal with, there are thousands of edge cases. And then, to top it off, the problem isn't really "calculating everything" but filling out the forms. Because the IRS expects PDFs.