Death and taxes have one other thing in common, apart from their certainty. They are both capable of inducing knee-buckling fear.
While the reasons for fearing the former are well established and universal among humans, the fear of taxes stems partly from the concern that we’ll get it wrong, and find ourselves in debt and legal trouble.
This fear is one of the chief deterrents to using an online tax filing service, and one of the biggest reasons why the major players, such as TurboTax, still lose out to real-world accountants.
TurboTax has this year introduced a new video chat service, complete with a reassuring, real-time human face to try and calm those fears. It seems the service’s existing, artificial intelligence-powered, text-based online guidance is too cold and inhuman for many people to trust.
That’s unfortunate because we’re still of the opinion that the rise of such automation actually makes it much easier and quicker to deal with the bureaucratic, standard form drudgery of everyday life online.
