As of 11 August 2026, AI cannot file your Self Assessment tax return.
This still needs a person who signs their name to it.
Can you do it?
15 minutesto a draft.
n/ait cannot be self-verified.
Cost, all in£0
Skill neededchat-fluent
Who has to check ita professional
What the alternative costsAn accountant files a straightforward Self Assessment for £150–£300 (checked 2026-08-11).
If this goes wrong: you file a return claiming a relief you were not entitled to, and you find out when HMRC opens an enquiry eighteen months later — with penalties accruing from the filing date.
What to actually do
Hand it to a person
The route this page recommends
Someone with a licence or accountable authority has to sign this before it counts.
Use a tool built for this
Second choicePurpose-built software does the mechanical share of this — see what to use below.
Do it yourself
The distant thirdA chat interface gets you a draft — but you cannot verify it yourself, which is the catch.
The prompt
List the documents and figures I need to gather before filing a UK Self Assessment return as a sole trader, and the deadlines that apply this tax year. Do not estimate any figure and do not tell me which reliefs apply to me.
Run it in ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini (paste it there).
Tested with claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 (claude-haiku-4-5-20251001) on 2026-08-11.See the receipt — the raw output, stored.
What it gets wrong
- States reliefs and allowances with confidence for tax years it has not seen — the numbers drift yearly and the model’s are stale.
- Cannot be verified by the person asking: if you could check the answer, you would not need to ask.
- The signature on the return is yours; the liability never transfers to the tool.
Why AI falls short here
What to use
TaxScouts— affiliate link: this site is paid if you buy
£169 (Tax return, one-off, checked 2026-08-11)
A flat-fee accredited accountant who files for you — the "human" door priced as a product rather than an hourly unknown.
Why a paid link sits on a NO ruling: The verdict is NO because filing needs an accountable professional — this link IS the professional route, not a workaround of the verdict. Flat fee, accredited, files on your behalf.
HMRC Online Services
Free
Filing directly with HMRC is free and official; the work is gathering the figures, which is where the risk lives, not the form.
How we scored this
| Axis | Score (0–2) |
|---|---|
| Output | 1 |
| Inputs | 1 |
| Verification | 0 |
| Liability | 0 |
| Effort delta | 1 |
| Total | 3 / 10 |
The rubric, the thresholds and the routing rule are published in full at/method.
Handed to AI by 0 people.
Questions people ask
The four questions readers actually bring to this task are hand-written per ruling and land with the next corpus update.