Why it stops instead of guessing
Most of the risk in filling a tax form is not a blank box. It is a box with a confident, wrong number in it — because you cannot tell by looking that it is wrong.
So Tax Forms is built so that guessing is not something it can do. Every line on a form is in exactly one known state at all times, and the export is blocked until all of them are either settled or verifiably blank. An empty box on the output means “this does not apply to you”, not “we never got to it”.
A language model reads documents, and it works out what a form asks and how its lines add up. What it is never allowed to do is supply a fact. Everything it says about a form is checked, word for word, against text downloaded from irs.gov — and whatever cannot be found there is thrown away, and that line becomes a question for you instead.
The arithmetic itself, the rules about what to ask, and the decision to let you export are ordinary code with tests. The only time anything you supplied reaches a model is when it reads a document you uploaded.
Every line is in one of these
- Settled
- A value is in, and it records where it came from.
- Needs you
- Tax Forms could not source it, so it is asking rather than filling.
- Confirm this
- Carried over from a previous year. Yours to confirm or correct.
- Waiting
- A computed line whose inputs are not all in yet.
- Sources disagree
- Two sources gave different values. Tax Forms will not choose.
- Blank on purpose
- Verified not to apply to you — not skipped.
The form cannot be exported while any line is in one of the middle four.