Minnesota gives accountants no evidentiary privilege of their own. The only roof over confidential tax work in a Minnesota courtroom is counsel's — and Minnesota's privilege statute already reaches the attorney's employees.
If the law ask is granted, tax is the shorter walk.

Minn. Stat. §595.02 is Minnesota's privilege list: attorney, clergy, physician, nurse, psychologist, and more. No accountant appears anywhere in it. What the accountancy act provides instead is §326A.12:

The section's own exceptions give the game away: nothing in it prohibits "disclosures in court proceedings." A duty that yields to a subpoena is professional ethics, not evidence law. Some states legislated an accountant-client privilege — the root site text-verified Colorado, Missouri, and Idaho. Minnesota did not.

Federal law does not fill the gap. §7525 reaches only noncriminal federal tax matters — never a state court, a state agency, a criminal matter, or private litigation. In a Minnesota state tax controversy, the only confidentiality shelter that exists is the attorney-client privilege itself.

The second clause is Minnesota's own version of what Kovel built federally in 1961: the supervised person inside counsel's engagement shares counsel's silence. The root page holds the federal doctrine with its limits stated out loud.

The Minnesota question is narrower, and open. Whether a supervised AI agent — engaged by counsel, directed by counsel, for the purpose of the legal consultation, held in confidence — sits where the statute's employee and Kovel's accountant sit, no Minnesota court has said. No court anywhere has squarely held that a supervised AI agent receives Kovel treatment. Both sentences belong on the same page, and here they are.

Minnesota placed law students inside the privilege in 2013 and legal paraprofessionals in 2020, both under the Supervised Practice Rules' non-waiver sentence. The third ask keeps every condition and changes the noun.

Every one of those conditions maps onto tax practice unchanged. A named supervising professional carrying personal responsibility. A client who is told and accepts. Certification and registration. A contractual zero-retention, no-training confidentiality floor. Reserved acts stay human — final advice, signatures, settlement. A tamper-evident audit trail. A pilot before permanence. And tax begins further down the road the law petition has to build: its certified non-lawyers have been inside the work for generations, its counsel-engaged structure is sixty-five years of federal doctrine, and that structure is already the only privilege roof Minnesota offers tax work at all.

Much of counsel-engaged tax work needs no Minnesota rule change — that is the root page's holding. What the rider adds is Minnesota's negative space: state proceedings §7525 never reaches, a privilege list with no accountant in it, and an employee clause written long before a machine could be anyone's employee. A grant of the law ask would answer the open question for legal practice; this page is the case that tax practice should be read in its light.

The list, in one paragraph.

Minn. Stat. §595.02 — the privilege list and the employee clause of subdivision 1(b) — verbatim from revisor.mn.gov. §326A.12, its court-proceedings exception, and the structure of chapter 326A, from revisor.mn.gov. §481.02, read in full for the absence of any tax exception, from revisor.mn.gov. Sperry v. Florida and 31 C.F.R. §10.3 from law.cornell.edu. 26 U.S.C. §7525, Kovel, and their limits are held on the root page and at tax.org.ai/privilege, with their own sources. Gardner v. Conway, 234 Minn. 468 (1951) — Minnesota's own line-drawing case between tax practice and law practice — we have not yet retrieved; until we have read it, nothing on this page cites it.