Tax Filing Assistant

Prepare federal income taxes with document ingestion, automated calculation, PDF generation, and guided filing through IRS Free File Fillable Forms.

What You Get

• 20 MCP tools for tax return management
• PDF document extraction — upload W-2, 1099, 1098 PDFs and Crow reads the values
• Tax calculation engine — 2024 and 2025 federal tax tables
• Dashboard panel — upload, verify, and manage tax documents
• Filled IRS PDFs — generates completed 1040, Schedule 1, Form 8889, Form 8863
• FFFF filing support — step-by-step guided filing via Free File Fillable Forms

Installation

1. Open the Extensions page in your Crow's Nest dashboard
2. Find Tax Filing Assistant and click Install
3. Enter an encryption key when prompted (this encrypts PII at rest)
4. The gateway restarts automatically — the Tax Filing panel appears in the sidebar

Document Upload

Go to Tax Filing → Documents in the sidebar.

Uploading

1. Select the document type (W-2, 1099-SA, 1098-T, etc.)
2. Select the owner: Taxpayer, Spouse, or Joint
3. Choose the PDF file and click Upload & Extract

Crow extracts values automatically using a dual extraction pipeline:

• Structural parser — for W-2s with concatenated text (e.g., Austin ISD format)
• Positional parser — for PDFs where values are in separate text layers (e.g., ILTexas format)

The system tries both methods and picks the one that extracts the most fields.

Verifying

After upload, each document shows an editable form with the extracted values. Fields with low confidence are highlighted in orange.

Always verify extracted values against your actual document before confirming. PDF extraction is not perfect — some fields may be wrong or missing.

For W-2s, the form shows:

• Employee name and SSN (used to auto-fill the tax return)
• All box values (1-6, 16-17)
• EIN and employer name

Managing Documents

• Confirm Values — saves the verified data
• Edit — reverts a confirmed document back to editable
• Delete — removes the document (with confirmation dialog)

Supported Document Types

Type	What It Extracts
W-2	Wages, withholding, SS/Medicare, employer, EIN, employee name/SSN, Box 12 codes
1099-SA	HSA distributions, distribution code, payer
1098-T	Tuition paid, scholarships, institution, student name, graduate/half-time status
1098-E	Student loan interest, lender
1098	Mortgage interest
1099-INT/DIV/NEC/G/MISC	Various income types

Preparing a Return

Via BYOAI Chat

The simplest way — tell your AI assistant:

"Prepare my tax return. Filing jointly, 2025."

Crow's crow_tax_prepare_from_documents tool creates the return in one call:

• Adds all confirmed W-2s, 1099s, 1098s
• Auto-fills taxpayer and spouse names/SSNs from W-2 documents
• Auto-configures HSA from W-2 code W + 1099-SA data
• Calculates the return

The AI will then ask clarifying questions:

• Program type — undergraduate, graduate, professional, or trade (affects education credit)
• Educator expenses — who is the educator and how much
• HSA coverage — self or family
• Special situations — 6013(h) election for nonresident spouse

Via MCP Tools Directly

For Claude Code or other MCP clients, use the tools in sequence:

crow_tax_new_return → crow_tax_add_w2 → crow_tax_add_1099 →
crow_tax_add_1098 → crow_tax_set_hsa → crow_tax_add_education_credit →
crow_tax_add_deduction → crow_tax_calculate → crow_tax_generate_pdfs

MCP Tools Reference

Tool	Description
crow_tax_prepare_from_documents	One-shot: create return from all confirmed documents
crow_tax_get_documents	List uploaded/confirmed documents
crow_tax_new_return	Create a new return
crow_tax_add_w2	Add a W-2
crow_tax_add_1099	Add a 1099 (SA, INT, DIV, NEC, G, MISC)
crow_tax_add_1098	Add a 1098 (E for student loan, main for mortgage)
crow_tax_add_deduction	Add deductions (educator, charitable, medical, SALT, IRA)
crow_tax_add_dependent	Add a dependent
crow_tax_set_hsa	Configure HSA details
crow_tax_set_self_employment	Add Schedule C income
crow_tax_set_capital_gains	Add Schedule D transactions
crow_tax_add_education_credit	Add 1098-T education credit (AOTC or LLC)
crow_tax_set_special	Set 6013(h) election, age 65+, blindness
crow_tax_calculate	Run full calculation with audit trail
crow_tax_validate	Check for errors and warnings
crow_tax_get_form	Get line-by-line values for a specific form
crow_tax_generate_pdfs	Fill IRS PDF forms
crow_tax_filing_guide	Generate FFFF filing instructions
crow_tax_ingest_document	Read a PDF and extract data
crow_tax_purge_return	Securely delete return data

Education Credits

The system supports two education credits:

Credit	Eligibility	Max Credit	Refundable
AOTC (American Opportunity)	Undergraduate, first 4 years	$2,500	40% ($1,000)
LLC (Lifetime Learning)	Any post-secondary (graduate, trade, professional)	$2,000	No

The credit type is determined by the program type, not just Box 9 on the 1098-T. The AI will ask what type of program you're enrolled in.

Security

• PII is encrypted at rest using AES-256-GCM with a user-provided passphrase
• SSNs are extracted from documents and stored encrypted — never sent to the AI in plain text
• Document PDFs are stored locally in ~/.crow/tax-documents/ (not uploaded to cloud)
• The AI never sees your SSN — the compound tool auto-fills it from encrypted storage

Limitations

• Federal returns only — no state income tax
• Not a substitute for professional tax advice
• PDF extraction may be inaccurate — always verify extracted values
• 2024 and 2025 tax years supported