ATO data shows 66 millionaires paid no income tax in 2020-21

The Australia Institute's senior economist Matt Grudnoff said ”Tax is the price we pay for living in a civilised society and everyone should pay their fair share. Being able to afford expensive accountants should not be a way out of paying tax”. A similar thing happens with the IRS, who wanted $80 billion to employ people to analyse tax returns better – they were knocked down to $60 billion.

A problem is that the tax codes, both here and in the US, are complex, and an accountant can find ways around them. One way of fixing the leakage is to close the loopholes (but that is not going to happen without a fight). Another way is to feed the tax codes into an AGI machine, which reads and “understands” them, and can compete with an expensive tax accountant or lawyer. At the moment, a tax accountant earning a million a year and with one aim, to make their client pay no tax, is competing with a relatively lowly paid public servant, who has a heavy workload, so they can easily be bamboozled. Having a machine using the legislation directly, rather than through some crude program which can’t handle the niceties of the legislation, would allow the machine to bamboozle the tax accountant or lawyer – it would have everything at its fingertips (it doesn’t have fingertips, but it can handle many things in play, whereas humans can handle only four things in play in their conscious mind, so it is easy for them to get confused and give up).

Activating legislation seems a good application for an AGI tool – it might have prevented Robodebt (what wasn’t easily programmed was ignored, and what should have been easily programmed was deliberately misinterpreted – working directly from the legislation would have avoided a lot of heartache, and refusal by the malefactors to do so would have raised a red flag). AGI could also handle AML/CTF (a word in that legislation is “reckless” – you can imagine programmers spending their time working out how to implement that, or not). The other area is plans and specifications – anywhere where complex text is needed to describe complex activities is an ideal area for AGI.

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