Tax prep reimagined as a review & verify workflow

TurboTax Live Full Service experts take on the most complex side of tax preparation: building complete returns on behalf of customers. But the tools they were using created a hidden friction — tax documents and the underlying tax forms weren’t connected, forcing experts to manually cross-reference between them to catch errors and verify accuracy. Time-consuming, error-prone, and far from the high-value advisory work these professionals were trained to do.

The design challenge was to rethink the workflow entirely. Rather than experts manually transferring and verifying data, the vision was a system where the return is auto-populated and the expert’s job shifts to reviewing, confirming, and focusing attention on what actually requires professional judgment — the optimizations, the year-over-year planning, the decisions that get customers the best possible tax outcome. This project was a hypothesis-driven journey, working closely with tax experts to understand how they worked and where the existing tools were costing them most.

The result was an enhanced workflow built directly into the Intuit Expert Portal — a structured review and verification experience that surfaces extracted data alongside the return, tracks status across source documents, and gives experts a clear, efficient path from intake to completion. The interaction design behind this work has been submitted for a U.S. patent, recognizing the novelty of how document data, verification status, and expert workflow were integrated into a single cohesive interface.