There are two things in life you can’t escape. Death is one. The tax code is the other.
The tax code, bless its heart, is a monster. It was written by ten thousand lawyers who were all paid by the hour, and it’s a million pages long, and it contradicts itself on every third page. It’s a game of “Mother, May I?” played in a minefield. It’s designed to be terrifying.
And you, or some poor bastard in your accounting department, have to play this game every single quarter.
The accountant sits there. He’s just a man. He has a family. He has a mortgage. He is sweating. He looks at the million-page monster, and the monster looks back. He thinks, “Did I do it right? Did I carry the one? Am I a ‘planner,’ or am I a ‘criminal’? Is there a difference?”
He doesn’t know. He can’t know. No human brain can hold that whole terrible book in its head at once.
So, in his terror, he does the only human thing to do. He calls for help. He calls the Pricy Auditor.
The Auditor is a man who claims to have tamed the monster. He’s a monster-whisperer. He flies in, charges your company a king’s ransom, and spends three weeks looking for the monster under your bed. He’s not really there to help you. He’s there to sell you insurance. Insurance against your own fear. “I have checked,” he says, “and for $50,000, I can report that you are probably not going to jail today.”
What a racket. So it goes.
But now, we have something new. We have a ghost. A machine-ghost. We call it “Data Analytics.” Or “AI.” Whatever.
This machine is not a man. It does not have a mortgage. It does not sweat. It is not afraid of the million-page monster.
It just… eats it.
It inhales the entire, contradictory, insane tax code in about four seconds. Then it inhales your entire, messy, very human financial history. All of it. Every lunch receipt, every bad investment, every invoice.
And then it plays the game. Perfectly.
It finds the legal paths, the “efficiencies,” the little trap-doors the lawyers built for their friends. It cross-references ten million transactions against Rule 47-B, Sub-section 9, Paragraph 12. It doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t get bored. It doesn’t call in an expensive friend.
It just runs the maze, finds the cheese, and avoids the traps. It does the auditor’s $50,000 job for the price of electricity.
It’s not magic. It’s just a very fast, very obedient, very un-scared idiot. And in a game designed to frighten you to death, the idiot who can’t feel fear is king.
