Tax law: an entagled field of expertise

At SMRTR we created a comprehensive chatbot which is able to retrieve court cases, thus support you with relevant tax law information.

Tax laws are notoriously difficult to understand, no matter the national case law in question. Digging through a vast knowledge to find an answer to a particular tax question is difficult. However, an application which can generate arguments as answer to a particular question can have a significant impact in this area.

By integrating computational reasoning with tax law documents, a new wave of tax tools will challenge the norm. The tools will then manage not only to forecast future consequences, but to also produce their own arguments behind expected outcomes, justifying their predictions with explanations.

Our modest goal

So here’s our solution: starting small. By carving out a tiny – yet important – slice of tax legislation, VAT on the supply of building lands and focusing exclusively on that scope. We have created an opening into the auto-reasoning tax algorithm of the future.

Meet TaxAssist, a chatbot which answers your questions about tax law! The user can ask a yes or no legal question and get an answer with generated arguments backing the answer.

The application combines two sources of data:

• Delimited number of existing law cases (EUR-Lex database of EU Court decisions)
• law knowledge compressed to its core (World’s First Simple Tax Law)

Plethora of possible end-users

There are multiple key players which could benefit from the application. To name a few:

• Tax law researchers. They want to be at the forefront of the small group of tax researchers who teach and write about technology in tax law.
• National tax collection services. The tool is necessary as part of digital transformations at collection services. They need to be aware of changes in tax case law.
• Advocate generals at European Court of Justice. They need the application to make totally sure their opinion is complete and give them competitive advantage.
• Tax advisory companies. They need the application to cut costs, enhance service quality and free up from their work backlog.

The future of tax law

The ultimate NLP tax tool will allow users to process basic yes or no questions about VAT on the supply of building land. The final solution will go one step further than existing NLP tax tools: it will provide its own legally valid arguments. Stay tuned for SMRTR’s progress in tax law!