What is the 'Open Accountants' project and why was it created?

Open Accountants is a community project built in response to LLMs computing incorrect tax returns. The founder noticed a growing number of people using LLMs (like Claude) to compute their own taxes, which is risky because LLMs hallucinate. The project builds a set of 'skills' — markdown files (essentially structured documents) that developers upload into an LLM's context so that when asked to compute taxes, the model refers to verified rules rather than guessing. The founder first tested this with European VAT returns: Claude got the calculation wrong initially, but after uploading his own professional knowledge as a 'skill' document, it got it right. The project currently has about 28 accountants, aiming for one accountant per jurisdiction to write and verify these skill sets (currently covering India, South Africa, Malta, and some smaller jurisdictions, with a goal to expand into the US and UK). Accountants can claim a jurisdiction, verify skill documents (either by reviewing an extracted worksheet in Excel or reviewing submissions sent by email), and get their name attached to the verified work. The site is openaccountants.com.