Artificial intelligence – could AI revolutionise inheritance tax planning?

read time: 2 min

15.09.23

Rebecca Carey

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly powerful in the professional world and its impact on the legal industry is particularly evident. Although the implementation of AI in the legal profession is still in its early stages, embracing AI in the future will positively transform the ways in which lawyers provide inheritance tax advice to clients.

The potential capabilities of AI assisting with inheritance tax planning are extensive and include:

Readily processing vast quantities of data in order to identify tax efficient approaches
Advising of any possible challenges which may arise regarding taxation strategy
Automating data entry tasks and storing valuations of assets in order to calculate inheritance tax
Identifying patterns and trends in order to assist with tax planning
Providing professionals with relevant case law

Law firms are continuously strategising to increase quality of service and drive efficiency and profitability. In order to provide thorough and pragmatic inheritance tax advice to clients, lawyers are required to obtain and process large amounts of information which is inevitably a lengthy process.

The EY 2020 Global Tax Technology and Transformation Survey revealed that a typical tax team spends 40-70% of its time gathering and manipulating data. AI is giving rise to innovative technologies – those of which are capable of processing huge amounts of data within a fraction of the time and will have the ability to utilise the data, to provide appropriate tax recommendations.

Aside from the obvious benefit of time efficiency, AI technologies are considered to be extremely accurate with regards to processing and recording data.

Factors inhibiting the use of AI systems

Although the increasing utilisation of AI software is inevitable, there are various hurdles to overcome before AI can be readily used by lawyers in day-to-day practice. One of the biggest considerations with regards to AI and tax planning is the technology’s ability to receive unseen or uncertain data, also to effectively process this information to provide appropriate advice. It is therefore anticipated that AI produced taxation recommendations will need to be reviewed by lawyers, in order to mitigate the risk of incorrect or incomplete advice.

Despite possible limitations to AI, there is no doubt that having lower level tasks carried out by technology will positively impact the legal profession, enabling professionals to work more efficiently and focus on the more complex taxation issues.

For more information, please contact Rebecca Carey.

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