# tax.org.ai > Sixty-five years ago a federal court put an accountant inside the > attorney-client privilege because accounting is a foreign language to > lawyers. For a lawyer's supervised AI agent doing counsel-engaged tax work, > that door is already open. This site is the map through it — no rule change > required. tax.org.ai is a program of the Org.AI Foundation (foundation.org.ai) — the third sibling. law.org.ai/mn is the ask being made; med.org.ai is the ask being prepared; tax.org.ai is different: it publishes the answer already latent in existing doctrine, plus two educational practice artifacts. ## Status Nothing on this site is legal advice, tax advice, or accounting service. No client is served here, nothing is for sale, and no attorney-client or accountant-client relationship is formed. The artifacts are educational templates for a reader's own counsel to adapt. No court has squarely held that a supervised AI agent receives Kovel treatment. ## The position 1. THE DOCTRINE. United States v. Kovel, 296 F.2d 918 (2d Cir. 1961) (Friendly, J.), put an accountant employed by a tax law firm inside the attorney-client privilege: the privilege extends where the third party's presence is "necessary, or at least highly useful, for the effective consultation between the client and the lawyer." The limit sits on the same page: if the advice sought is the accountant's rather than the lawyer's, no privilege exists. Four operating conditions: engagement by counsel (not the client); direction and control by counsel; purpose of making the legal consultation effective; confidentiality and segregation from non-legal work. The Second Circuit itself narrowed Kovel in United States v. Ackert, 169 F.3d 136 (2d Cir. 1999), to third parties who improve comprehension of attorney-client communications — an agent that generates independent analysis is a real, circuit-dependent risk this program states rather than papers over. 2. THE RULING. United States v. Heppner, No. 25 Cr. 503 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 17, 2026) (Rakoff, J.) is the first considered AI-privilege ruling, and it is negative-space guidance only. It did NOT hold that AI use waives privilege; it denied a pro se defendant's claim over solo consumer-AI use on three traditional grounds: no attorney involved; platform data-retention and training terms defeating any expectation of confidentiality; no legal advice from counsel being sought. Work product failed because the material was created on the defendant's own volition, not at attorney direction. Each failure, inverted, is a drafting requirement a counsel-engaged, zero-retention, audit-logged supervised agent answers. Heppner tells you what failure looks like — not what success is guaranteed to look like. (The memorandum itself has not yet been retrieved; until it is read, this site describes the ruling only through the published analysis it cites.) 3. THE STATUTE. IRC §7525(a)(1) extends "the same common law protections of confidentiality which apply to a communication between a taxpayer and an attorney" to federally authorized tax practitioners, by reference. Whatever the attorney-client common law comes to hold about supervised AI agents flows into §7525 automatically — no separate ask on the accounting side. The perforations are severe and stated plainly: noncriminal federal tax matters only (§7525(a)(2)); no written tax-shelter-promotion communications (§7525(b)); no return preparation (United States v. Frederick, 182 F.3d 496, 500-01 (7th Cir. 1999), which also strips dual-purpose documents — hence strict channel separation from return-prep work). §7525 is never to be sold as the reason a workflow is safe. 4. THE WALL. United States v. Arthur Young & Co., 465 U.S. 805, 817-18 (1984): the independent auditor is a "public watchdog" owing "complete fidelity to the public trust." The audit/attest side is defined by non-confidentiality and is expressly out of this program's scope. Advice-side only: tax advice, controversy representation, litigation support. ## The artifacts Two educational practice artifacts, each carrying a plain not-legal-advice notice and a "have your counsel adapt this" instruction: - Kovel engagement-letter template (counsel-engaged supervised AI agent): human face https://tax.org.ai/kovel-letter machine face https://tax.org.ai/kovel-letter.md - AICPA Rule 1.700.001 confidentiality compliance memo (Interpretation 1.700.040 service-provider paths; no-evidentiary-privilege disclaimer): human face https://tax.org.ai/confidentiality-memo machine face https://tax.org.ai/confidentiality-memo.md The deep page — the four bases, the checklist, the honest counterarguments — is https://tax.org.ai/privilege. ## Sources Every claim names a primary source: law.cornell.edu (26 U.S.C. §7525 and United States v. Arthur Young & Co. verbatim), law.resource.org (Ackert and Frederick full text), published analysis of Heppner by counsel who read it, the Journal of Accountancy on AICPA Rule 1.700.001, and text-verified state law for Colorado (C.R.S. §13-90-107(1)(f)), Missouri (RSMo §326.322) and Idaho (I.R.E. 515) only. Kovel's quoted passages are cross-verified through secondary full-text sources; its limiting sentence is pin-checked before use as a blockquote. ## Licence and use Nothing on tax.org.ai is generated at request time. This page and this file are static, self-contained, and make zero external requests. Nothing here is legal advice, nothing is for sale, and nothing forms an attorney-client or accountant-client relationship.