Papers for

tax software developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Law and order achieves perfect accuracy autoformalizing tax law forms

Law And Order: Tax Law Autoformalization

Abstract: Legal systems are increasingly implemented through software, yet scalable methods for translating legal texts into accurate symbolic representations remain underdeveloped. We study this problem through tax law, where forms and filing instructions define large computational structures involving arithmetic, branching, recursion, and tabular reasoning. We propose Law&Order, a neuro-symbolic framework for automatically formalizing tax forms and instructions into executable symbolic programs. Our approach establishes two forms of correspondence between law and logic: structural correspondence, which aligns legal and symbolic components such as cells and schedules, and denotational correspondence, which requires symbolic components to implement the computations specified by their legal counterparts. We combine large language model synthesis with cell-level verification and iterative localized error repair using human-written OpenTaxSolver tax returns. We then evaluate the resulting formalizations on independently authored, held-out TaxCalcBench returns, that are never exposed during generation or repair. Although the most advanced LLM achieves only 66% accuracy, Law&Order achieves 100% cell-level and form-level accuracy on 51 held-out returns, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining LLM-based synthesis with symbolic verification for scalable and verifiable large-scale legal autoformalization compared with using an LLM alone.

Fri 2 OctArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Translating legal tax documents into computer programs is very hard because tax rules involve lots of math and complex instructions. The authors created Law&Order, a system that uses AI together with step-by-step checks to turn tax forms and rules into exact symbolic programs computers can run. This system was tested on tax returns it had never seen before and reached 100% accuracy, much better than using AI alone. This means Law&Order can reliably help turn written tax laws into computer-understandable formats.
Open → 2610.02792v1