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With the tax deadline looming, the more than 40 million U.S. residents who speak Spanish at home are finally getting some help from the IRS and TurboTax.
By Kelly Phillips Erb and Maria Gracia Santillana Linares, Forbes Staff
For 15 years, San Diego accountant Maria Purser has been using Intuit’s TurboTax software to help her immigrant parents prepare their 1040 tax returns. It’s been a bit of an ordeal, since her Venezuelan parents, now in their late seventies, are more comfortable in Spanish than English and have wanted Purser to translate and explain everything, no matter how complicated.
“Because they’re elderly, they always want to know every single detail, they don’t want to feel like they’re being scammed,” says Purser, 47. “If you don’t understand what you’re doing, it makes it more difficult to trust that you will get the guaranteed refunds.” (Her dad, as a retired electrical engineer, naturally likes to understand how things work.)
With the April 15 tax filing deadline looming, Purser expects things will be easier this weekend when she sits down with her parents to do their taxes. That’s because she’ll be using a new Spanish language version of the tax software—one that includes every bit of help, explanations and resources that TurboTax’s English language products do, thanks to a big artificial intelligence-enabled translation push. “It’s going to be smoother because for once we’ll be talking only in Spanish. They’ll be reading along and not having to rely on what I say,” Purser says.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 68 million U.S. residents spoke a language other than English at home in 2019. Of that total, 42 million were Spanish speakers, up from 11 million in 1980. More than one in five of at-home Spanish speakers said they spoke English either not well, or not at all. Throw in some complicated tax and financial terms, and doing a tax return in English could be overwhelming for millions. How much of your Social Security benefits are taxable? Try explaining the bizarre formula to any retiree in their native language, let alone one in which they’re less than fluent.
The IRS was initially slow to meet the needs of non-English speakers. It provided at least some information in Spanish as early as 1972, but didn’t make the basic Form 1040 with instructions fully available in Spanish until the 2020 tax filing year. For that same year, it also introduced Schedule LEP in Spanish and English—when filed with a tax return, it allows taxpayers to indicate an other-than-English language preference for IRS-issued written communications.
This isn’t just about immigrants. It took a lawsuit by the National Federation of the Blind for the traditionally service-challenged IRS to agree in 2020 to develop a process for taxpayers to request post-filing tax notices in formats such as Braille and large print.
But more recently, the IRS has made a real effort to ramp up services for traditionally underserved taxpayers, including bilingual ones. It now issues a total of 142 tax forms, instructions, and publications in Spanish (still just a fraction of the more than 2,000 in English). The new pilot program that lets taxpayers from 12 states with simple returns file directly with the IRS launched in Spanish on March 12, just a month after its debut in English.
There’s now a Spanish-language version of the IRS.gov website (which, among other things, allows you to track your refund in Spanish). The IRS2go mobile app (also useful for refund tracking) is available in Spanish as well as English. And if you’re not ready to file by April 15, you can get an automatic six month extension using Form 4868 or Formulario 4868 or apply for the extension online for free at the IRS Free File site –again in English or Spanish.
As for human interaction, if taxpayers call ahead and make an appointment, they can now get translation services in every one of the 338 physical Taxpayer Assistance Centers–though some offices may use over-the-phone translation services.
But the IRS still has a long way to go. Even the most common information returns—including Forms W-2 and 1099s—can still only be filed in English. And only one of the IRS’ s eight private sector FreeFile partners offers a Spanish language option.
Enter TurboTax, which dropped out of FreeFile two tax seasons ago following years of controversy over whether it was directing taxpayers looking for free services to paid ones. (In 2023, it sent $141 million in checks to more than 4 million consumers who paid for software, but could have done their returns for free in 2016, 2017 and 2018.)
Love it or hate it, TurboTax is the big kahuna of consumer tax software. Last year, 45 million individual tax returns were filed using TurboTax–more than a quarter of the 160 million 1040s filed in total. A little less than half of individual taxpayers do their own returns and most of them use software, withTurboTax grabbing the majority of that market.
This year, after harnessing AI for translation, TurboTax has rolled out its full suite of products for the filing of 2023 returns in Spanish. That includes its software only version (free to $129, with state filing extra); its Live-Assist version ($89 to $219, with state filing extra); and its full professional tax prep (starting at $339 for investors and $469 for the self-employed, with state returns extra).
The full bilingual lineup was a longtime goal of Mark Notarainni, now general manager of Intuit’s Consumer Group, who began testing some Spanish language services more than a half decade ago while he was Intuit’s chief customer success officer. (He’s fluent in Spanish and married to a native Spanish speaker from Argentina.)
“For years, we had heard this, ‘Hey, if I could just speak to somebody in Spanish about my question,’” Notarainni says. “Technology was a big breakthrough this year for us.”
Intuit explains its current process this way: human tax analysts review all changes to the tax content in its products, and in many cases, they even author it. After those changes get translated by an AI program, the Spanish language version goes to a new queue to be reviewed for translation accuracy.
Before this year, Spanish-speaking taxpayers turning to TurboTax had to use Live-Assist or Full-Service (or something ad-hoc, like Google translate). “They couldn’t really understand the tax forms. They couldn’t really understand what they were being asked in the software,” says Miguel Burgos, a bilingual TurboTax CPA originally from Puerto Rico. That meant when he worked with customers in Live-Assist, he felt like he was functioning as much as a translator as a tax expert. Plus, he says, “The taxpayer would have to trust me 100%,” since they couldn’t understand the English forms themselves.
Intuit also debuted this year a free bilingual AI powered chatbot, Intuit Assist, which doesn’t always know the answers—in either language. For example, in our English language tests, the bot was able to correctly answer some softball questions, advising for example, that if you have no income, you don’t qualify for the earned income credit test, and providing general guidelines to help determine if you need to file a return.
But it struggled to provide an easy-to-understand answer to more specific, individual-fact dependent questions, and provided an irrelevant answer to one of our general questions. (When asked, “What is a dependent?” the bot answered: “Beginning in 2018, the exemption deduction goes away until 2025. The Credit for Other Dependents is $500. A credit is different from a deduction in that the credit directly reduces your tax while a deduction reduces the amount of income that is subject to tax.” That’s all technically true–it’s just not particularly useful if you’re trying to decide if someone is your dependent.)
H&R Block also now offers a generative AI chatbot as part of its do-it-yourself-software, but only in English.
When the TurboTax bot can’t help you, it doesn’t appear to make things up (a problem with generative AI known as “hallucination”). Instead, it suggests you upgrade and speak to a live TurboTax tax expert which, of course, costs extra. That’s obviously good for Intuit’s profits, but also for the taxpayer since if you make a mistake on your taxes, you can’t wriggle out of any IRS penalties by blaming bad bot advice. Even if there are no penalties, fixing a mistake with the IRS can be a massive time sink.
“When you get into these complex situations, I think AI’s gonna have a while to go,’’ says Carlos Lopez, a Salinas, California enrolled agent who has done tax returns for 37 years and has been training other Latinos in tax and accounting for 17 years. His business, Latino Tax Pro, has grown to six offices, with more than 50 employees, and offers English, Spanish and bilingual training.
Lopez, like Intuit, is already harnessing AI to make his business more efficient. Latino Tax Pro offers an Ask A Tax Pro product on its website that promises tax preparers an answer to specific questions in 24 to 48 hours. When recorded questions come in they’re fed into what he describes as a “a huge database of questions that a lot of Hispanics or Spanish speaking people will ask us,” with an AI system spitting out suggested answers. Lopez’s team of enrolled agents then vet those answers before sending them out.
Lopez has also been using Speechify, a text to speech AI app to turn both English and Spanish written content into videos for tax preparers—in his own voice.
TurboTax has aggressively promoted its Spanish language debut with everything from a Super Bowl ad on the Univision stream, to in-person events in heavily Hispanic areas like Miami, Los Angeles and Houston and deals with bilingual social media influencers.
Venezuelan-American Marianna Girgenti, a Miami resident with 1.4 million TikTok followers and a million on Instagram, is known for comically mimicking different regional Spanish accents. A TurboTax user herself, she’s done live events and a series of six videos for Intuit. In one, she plays a Dominican mother-daughter duo talking about the process of filing taxes. “I speak English very well but there are a couple of things I need your help with. Imagine if I had a couple of bilingual experts that understood my perfect Spanglish!” the frantic mother tells her daughter, in a mix of Spanish and English (aka Spanglish).
“Mom, TurboTax has everything you are asking for!” the beleaguered daughter says, before switching to a robotic sounding Spanish voice, devoid of regional variations, meant to sound like the Spanish used in the TurboTax program.
Girgenti, a 27-year old architect who does videos as a side-gig, says the scene picks up on what she’s heard from her own friends and folks she has met at TurboTax events. “A lot of the people that were between their twenties and thirties were also thinking ‘I’m fully bilingual, but for my parents, aunts, uncles, this is something I can see benefitting older generations in my family.’”
