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New AI Assistant Is First Tool to Be Introduced Leveraging the Innovation Studio

Arlington, VA — Today Bloomberg Tax & Accounting announced the launch of its Innovation Studio, an ideation environment that offers access to new tools, including generative-AI powered capabilities, that are currently under development for the Bloomberg Tax platform.

The Innovation Studio is available to select Bloomberg Tax customers. The AI Assistant, the first feature released within the Innovation Studio, provides answers to common questions, assists users with tasks, and enables them to leverage documents in helpful ways, such as summarization. The AI Assistant follows a number of generative AI tools previously available via Bloomberg Tax Research, such as Bloomberg Tax Answers and the AI Expression Generator on Bloomberg Tax Workpapers.

“We are excited to leverage the Innovation Studio as a new mechanism to collaborate with our customers to develop and evaluate new and innovative product features that help them do their work more effectively and efficiently,” said Lisa Fitzpatrick, president, Bloomberg Tax & Accounting. “We know from experience that the best way to ensure success of the platform’s AI capabilities is in close collaboration with our users, and incorporating their feedback as we develop new products is a longstanding practice at Bloomberg Tax & Accounting.”

Customers have responded positively to Bloomberg Tax’s existing AI tools. Providing customers with access to the new Innovation Studio will give users earlier access to features in development while also serving as a means to quickly get users’ critical feedback.

“Bloomberg Tax Answers is perfect when starting out your research,” said an associate director, global tax compliance and reporting at a sneaker and apparel platform who participated in the testing of the AI Assistant. “It gives you the broad answer first with the ability to dig deeper into the references listed.”

The Innovation Studio approach was introduced by Bloomberg Industry Group in 2023 to prioritize incorporating customer feedback and iteration into the newest product concepts and ensure that new tools meet demand and fit workflows.

For more information on Bloomberg Tax’s AI tools, visit https://aboutbtax.com/bfNC.

Chris Gollon

Bob Newsholme, the tax professional accused in 2021 of defrauding potentially hundreds of clients to the tune of $300,000, has died while awaiting extradition to Flagler County. He passed away on November 8th in hospice care in Las Vegas, Nevada. According to the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, Newsholme moved out west after the revelation of his alleged crimes.

The reason for Newsholme being across the country from the jurisdiction in which his alleged crimes were committed is that law enforcement arrested him as a fugitive from the law; Newsholme was at-large and wanted in Flagler County until almost three years after the fact. He became ill while in the custody of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department at the Clark County Detention Center.

A Strange, Grim Saga

The death of Newsholme in Nevada is not his first brush with mortality since his alleged fraud and embezzlement became known. On August 24th, 2021, Newsholme shot himself in the torso. He was found to have googled how to load a gun beforehand, and he initially hid his severe wound from his family members. Once it became known what had happened, he was treated at Halifax Health in Daytona Beach.

“This is a tragic end to an extensive investigation and fraud that he perpetrated on our victims,” said Flagler Sheriff Rick Staly. “While we won’t be able to hold him accountable for his actions on earth, he now must answer for his fraudulent activities and thefts to God, which is probably a more severe penalty than a court could have imposed. We extend our sympathy to his family and to his victims that had been anxiously waiting for their day in court. I want to thank the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and Clark County Detention Center for their assistance in this case.”

Newsholme was arrested and booked into the Clark County Detention Center on nine counts of grand theft plus one count of organized scheme to defraud. The FCSO said he’d taken up residence in a nonprofit assisted living center for seniors, trying to keep from being found out. On August 7th, he was taken into custody and denied bond. Newsholme formerly owned and operated Flagler Tax Service on SR-100 in Bunnell, just next to the building which used to be the Chicken Pantry.

• The IRS has gradually rolled out a program to allow Americans to directly file taxes with the IRS.
• It’s designed to make filing taxes simpler and easier.
• A group of Republicans want Donald Trump to end it, saying it’s government overreach.

More than two dozen House Republicans are asking President-elect Donald Trump to terminate the Internal Revenue Service’s free direct tax-filing system as soon as day one of his presidency.

Republican Reps. Adrian Smith of Nebraska and Chuck Edwards of North Carolina sent a letter to the president-elect on Tuesday urging him to end the program via executive order, saying it posed a “threat to taxpayers’ freedom from government overreach.”

The letter was signed by 27 other Republicans and is also addressed to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-leads of the Department of Government Efficiency.

The program came about as the result of the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $15 million in funding to study the creation of a website allowing Americans to directly file their taxes to the IRS for free. That led to the rollout of a pilot program that was available in 12 states last year and is set to expand to 24 states in 2025.

A spokesperson for the IRS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Many Americans rely on tax-prep companies such as TurboTax and H&R Block to do their taxes each year. The new program is designed to compete with those programs and make filing easier and less costly for Americans.

Smith and Edwards argued in their letter that the program represented a conflict of interest for the IRS — that the agency shouldn’t be in charge of both assessing taxes and enforcing them. The duo wrote that the agency “has little incentive to ensure hardworking Americans do not pay more than they owe in taxes.”

They also cast the free Direct File program as an example of the “weaponization of government against Americans,” a long-standing focus of Trump and the MAGA-aligned right.

It’s unclear whether Trump will take the lawmakers up on their request, and the Trump-Vance transition didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Republicans have broadly sought to roll back the $80 billion in additional funding for the IRS that was included in the Inflation Reduction Act, saying it will be used to enable the agency to target conservatives and ordinary taxpayers.