About
A tax return can look complete and still be wrong.
A missing basis adjustment related to RSU sell-to-cover transactions went undetected across four tax years and resulted in approximately $12,000 in overpaid tax.
On RSU sell-to-cover transactions, the broker-reported basis did not include compensation income already taxed through the W-2 — which can be entirely consistent with the reporting rules. The return workflow still had to pick up the corresponding basis adjustment. Mine did not.
The core failure was reconciliation: source documents, imported data, adjustments, and final returns were not systematically tied together.
That is the problem TaxScout is built around. Not calculation — professional tax software calculates well, and it is not the thing that failed. What failed was that nothing tied the source documents, the imported data, the adjustments, the prior-year information and the final return together in a way a reviewer could check.
01/Background
Before TaxScout, the founder spent 18+ years building technology, data and AI systems in regulated environments — most recently leading enterprise data, digital platform and generative-AI programs at Takeda.
Those environments teach you that the model is rarely the hardest part. Traceability, controls, governance, and knowing when a system should stop and ask a human are the hard parts.
Tax has the same shape. That is why the product surfaces low-confidence fields and validation exceptions for a person to decide, rather than quietly resolving them — and why every material action is recorded with the actor and the timestamp.
02/What we are building
TaxScout connects client intake, document processing, preparation, workpapers, review, billing, and client communication in one tax-native workflow. Supported returns e-file directly through IRS MeF under the firm's EFIN; firms can instead export approved data to the professional tax software they already use.
TaxScout e-files supported federal and state returns through IRS MeF under your firm's EFIN — or hands approved data to the professional tax software your firm already uses. E-file coverage is published per return type, and nothing is transmitted before the reviewer approves and the 8879 is signed. The first integration targets are Drake and CCH Axcess, and which one comes first is decided by design-partner demand and access to a licensed validation environment — not by preference.
03/Honest scope