Comment by tombert 3 days ago
Tangential, but a pet project I've been working on has been doing exactly that! Looking at US federal tax laws and using constraints solves to find optimal paths to the lowest taxes.
I don't really do anything besides play with it, my taxes are very simple and boring, but it's been a fun project to play around with.
Isn't it tax avoidance (legal) vs tax evasion (illegal)?
How? There's a big difference between avoidance and evasion, but avoidance and minimization mean pretty much the same thing in this context.
If there are any novel or situation-specific conclusions drawn, that sounds like an easy sell to CPAs and independent tax preparers. Maybe even individual tax optimizers.
My naive assumption is that sophisticated analysis will return the same few well-known recommendations almost all the time -- the taxation variant of eating properly, sleeping regularly, and getting appropriate exercise.
Certainly for anything I actually do, I've not found anything that is better than something like TurboTax gives me.
The scope of what I'm working on is trying to build strategies for holding and selling stock as well in order to minimize taxes. I've only ever used it on paper trades.
Yeah, that is tax minimization, not tax avoidance. There's a big difference.