Tax agents’ future questioned as AI finds answers in seconds

Ailira is so clever at tax, that her creator believes she could help prompt the end of human tax agents.

Ailira is the brainchild of Adrian Cartland

It’s Siri for lawyers and accountants. Ask “Ailira” a question about Australian tax law and she will scan through millions of uploaded documents and use her artificial intelligence nous to deliver an ­answer.

Ailira, or “Artificially Intelligent Legal Information Resource Assistant” is so clever at tax that her creator believes she could help prompt the end of human tax agents. And within two months, she will answer questions in other areas of Australian law.

Ailira is the brainchild of Adelaide-based tax lawyer Adrian Cartland. The story goes that with no professional tax background, his girlfriend Sarah, a speech pathology student, scored 73 per cent on a first-year university tax exam with just 30 minutes’ training and Ailira at her side.

“Your tax agents will probably be gone within five years,” said a confident Mr Cartland, who added that their demise was ­already happening with the Australian Taxation Office pushing to automate tax returns, technology issues not withstanding.

Mr Cartland is principal of taxation law specialist Cartland Law, and Ailira’s journey began 18 months or so ago when he contacted Texas cloud-based enterprise search firm Enlyton.

“They have this patented ­machine-learning algorithm that quickly learns a complex series of information, and comes to a natural language understanding of it; it doesn’t need training,” he said.

He gathered the documents from tax law databases, legislation, rulings and ATO private rulings. It was a case of “eat these millions of documents” and you’re a tax expert, he said. “Once Ailira ingested them, you could ask her complex tax questions, on superannuation, capital gains tax, or things like that.”

There was some tweaking of the algorithm to ensure accurate answers. He engaged developers in Adelaide for this.

The system went live in ­December after nine months of Beta testing and a few tweaks.

“The one thing we had difficulty with is that people are so used to doing keyword searches that they struggle to ask a question as you would to another human.

“So we did some upgrades of Ailira’s interface to encourage people to treat Ailira like a human, more in plain English.”

Mr Cartland said “hundreds of users” were now aboard. This week he revealed boutique law firm Waterhouse Lawyers as Ailira’s first Sydney client.

Principal director Tania Water­house had been a long-term tester of the system. She said Ailira had saved staff “hours of frustration”.

Adrian Cartland, principal of tax law specialist Cartland Law.

The firm’s tax practitioners could “find exactly what they are looking for in a matter of ­seconds”.

“It saves them from having to wade through countless volumes of legislation, supporting ­material, rulings and determinations to find the information they are seeking,” she said.

Ailira is now set to ingest millions more legal documents covering industrial relations, contract and corporate and family law, and state law covering stamp duty, payroll tax and criminal law.

“We’re just finalising a deal at the moment to get this through. The arrangement is for all law that is accessible. I don’t think there’s anything that will be really missing,” Mr Cartland said.

He said Ailira could be applied to anything. “I could upload 50 years of Women’s Day and she’d understand that,” he said.

To use Ailira, you type your query into a chat box. “It displays the correct answer or three or four most likely correct answers,” Mr Cartland said.

“If I ask: ‘Can the beneficiary of a bare trust claim the main resident capital gains tax exemption?’, it will come back and highlight rulings that say: ‘yes it can’.

“Other examples would be “Are bitcoins a CGT asset?” and “Does a market value substitution rule apply to CGT event D1?

“It either comes back with the answer or it’s highlighted in your first field of vision.

“If you type those questions in, you have the answer within 10 seconds. If there isn’t a direct ­answer, if you aren’t specific enough, you browse the most ­likely answers. You might need to refine your question.”

For professionals, the service costs $90 a month per user.

What about other roles in law? Could Ailira and AI have a role there? What about judgments? Could intelligent computers decide legal cases in the future?

“I think for smaller things, if I change it,” Mr Cartland said. “She can look at a complex set of facts and say ‘this is similar to another case, I found something quite similar to this’. I would see that starting at your low-level tax ­determinations.”

Mr Cartland is also Beta testing Ailira as a tool that consumers could access directly online. His company received a $20,000 grant from the South Australian government to build a prototype that covers domestic violence law.

“We have continued to work on that with our own funds, so in the next couple of months we want to come out with a public version of Ailira that will initially cover domestic violence, wills and business structures.”

He said this would operate as “a freemium model”. “All the advice and information is free but when you do something like generate a document or get a referral to a lawyer, there is a charge.

“So if you ask who should I have in my will, the reason I give you free information is because I want you to buy a will, and I will charge you for that.” He said private testing has gone on for three months.