stef-openclaw-skills/skills/us-cpa/SKILL.md

name, description

name	description
us-cpa	Use when answering U.S. federal individual tax questions, preparing a federal Form 1040 return package, or reviewing a draft/completed federal individual return.

US CPA

us-cpa is a Python-first federal individual tax workflow skill. The CLI is the canonical engine. Use the skill to classify the request, gather missing inputs, and invoke the CLI.

Modes

• question
  • one-off federal tax question
  • case folder optional
• prepare
  • new or existing return-preparation case
  • case folder required
• review
  • new or existing return-review case
  • case folder required

Agent Workflow

1. Determine whether the request is:
   • question-only
   • a new preparation/review case
   • work on an existing case
2. If the request is prepare or review and no case folder is supplied:
   • ask whether to create a new case
   • ask where to store it
3. Use the bundled CLI:

skills/us-cpa/scripts/us-cpa question --question "What is the standard deduction?" --tax-year 2025
skills/us-cpa/scripts/us-cpa question --question "What is the standard deduction?" --tax-year 2025 --style memo --format markdown
skills/us-cpa/scripts/us-cpa prepare --tax-year 2025 --case-dir ~/tax-cases/2025-jane-doe
skills/us-cpa/scripts/us-cpa export-efile-ready --tax-year 2025 --case-dir ~/tax-cases/2025-jane-doe
skills/us-cpa/scripts/us-cpa review --tax-year 2025 --case-dir ~/tax-cases/2025-jane-doe
skills/us-cpa/scripts/us-cpa review --tax-year 2025 --case-dir ~/tax-cases/2025-jane-doe --style memo --format markdown
skills/us-cpa/scripts/us-cpa extract-docs --tax-year 2025 --case-dir ~/tax-cases/2025-jane-doe --create-case --case-label "Jane Doe" --facts-json ./facts.json

When OpenClaw is using the installed workspace copy, the entrypoint is:

~/.openclaw/workspace/skills/us-cpa/scripts/us-cpa --help

Rules

• federal individual returns only in v1
• IRS materials first; escalate to primary law only when needed
• stop on conflicting facts and ask the user to resolve the issue before continuing
• official IRS PDFs are the target compiled-form artifacts
• deterministic field-fill is the preferred render path when the official PDF exposes usable fields
• overlay-rendered forms are the fallback and must be flagged for human review

Output

• JSON by default
• markdown output available with --format markdown
• question supports --style conversation|memo
• fetch-year downloads the bootstrap IRS form/instruction corpus into ~/.cache/us-cpa by default
• override the cache root with US_CPA_CACHE_DIR when you need an isolated run or fixture generation
• extract-docs creates or opens a case, registers documents, stores facts, extracts machine-usable facts from JSON/text/PDF sources where possible, and stops with a structured issue if facts conflict
• question currently has explicit IRS-first answers for standard deduction, Schedule C, Schedule D, and Schedule E questions; other questions escalate to primary-law research with official IRC/regulation URLs
• rendered form artifacts prefer fillable-field output when possible and otherwise fall back to overlay output
• prepare computes the current supported federal 1040 package, preserves fact provenance in the normalized return, and writes normalized return/artifact/report files into the case directory
• export-efile-ready writes a draft transmission-ready payload without transmitting anything
• review recomputes the return from case facts, checks artifacts, flags source-fact mismatches and likely omissions, and returns findings-first output in conversation or memo style

For operator details, limitations, and the planned case structure, see docs/us-cpa.md.