US Federal Tax Return Preparation Skill

A Claude Code skill for preparing US federal individual income tax returns.

What This Skill Does

This skill helps you:

• Plan document collection — Analyze a prior year return to generate a checklist of expected tax documents for the current year
• Identify required forms — Determine which IRS forms are needed based on your source documents
• Complete form PDFs — Fill out IRS form PDFs directly from your source documents with built-in validation
• Audit completed returns — Cross-check forms against source documents to catch common errors before filing

What This Skill Does NOT Do

• Tax advice or tax planning
• State tax returns (vary significantly by jurisdiction)
• E-filing (output is completed PDFs for printing and mailing)

Installation

Skills are markdown files placed in a skills/ directory that Claude Code discovers automatically.

Personal install (available across all your projects):

git clone https://github.com/calef/us-federal-tax-assistant-skill.git \
  ~/.claude/skills/us-federal-tax-assistant

Project install (current project only):

git clone https://github.com/calef/us-federal-tax-assistant-skill.git \
  .claude/skills/us-federal-tax-assistant

IRS form PDFs are not bundled in the repo. Download them separately after cloning:

cd ~/.claude/skills/us-federal-tax-assistant

# Download forms for a specific year (fast, ~few dozen MB)
python3 download-forms.py 2025

# Download forms for multiple years
python3 download-forms.py 2024 2025 2026

# Download all ~700 forms
python3 download-forms.py

Forms download into a local forms/<year>/ directory that is not committed to git. Requires Python 3 (stdlib only — no extra dependencies).

Usage

Once installed, Claude will automatically apply this skill when you mention:

• "tax return" / "tax filing"
• "1040" or IRS form names
• W-2, 1099, and related document types
• Requests to help with taxes

Typical Workflow

Step 1 — Document checklist Upload last year's tax return and ask Claude to generate a document checklist for this year.

Step 2 — Form identification Once you have your documents, upload them and ask Claude which IRS forms you'll need. Claude will provide direct links to download current blank forms from irs.gov.

Step 3 — Form completion Upload the blank forms along with your source documents. Claude will fill them out, performing validation checks as it goes.

Step 4 — Audit Ask Claude to audit the completed return, comparing source document values against what was entered.

Important: Always Use Current Year Forms

IRS form layouts and line numbers change annually. When completing forms, always download fresh copies from irs.gov and upload them — do not rely on cached copies.

Supported Forms

License

GPL v3 — see LICENSE.md