AskTomG.AI

The distinguishing idea here is not the search, it is the paperwork. AskTomG runs a question through Tom Gorczynski's seven-step research method and produces a contemporaneous, timestamped memo written to sit in the file as evidence of due diligence under Circular 230, section 6662 and section 6694. Every source it surfaces is labelled as either substantial authority or not, which is the distinction that actually matters when a preparer penalty is on the table and which most general AI assistants blur. A second mode, Authority Finder, skips the memo and just points at the source when a quick check is all that is needed. The corpus is federal: Internal Revenue Code, Treasury regulations, IRS rulings and publications, Audit Technique Guides, roughly 69,000 Tax Court documents and 19,000 federal court opinions.

It suits a solo enrolled agent or a small representation-heavy practice, which is unsurprising given who built it. Thomas Gorczynski, EA and USTCP, and Joshua Youngblood, EA, run the company as TAG26 LLC, and the product reads like software written by two practitioners for their own workflow. At $70 a month, or $700 paid annually, a single 1040 that avoids a penalty argument pays for a year. Firms with multistate exposure are the wrong buyer today: state coverage is listed as planned, not shipped, so a New York residency question or a California conformity issue has to be researched somewhere else.

The obvious weaknesses are scale and independence. This is a small operation with no published SOC 2 report, no named enterprise security programme, and no integration with tax preparation or document management software, so memos come out as exports and get filed by hand. The vendor states that client data is kept away from public AI models and is not used for training, but that is a statement rather than an audited control. There is no free trial advertised, no team or firm-wide pricing tier, and no editorial commentary layer, so the platform tells the practitioner what the authority says without an editor's explanation of how the authority is usually applied.

Compared with Blue J, this is a tenth of the price and a fraction of the coverage, with no licensed secondary content such as Tax Notes, but a much sharper output document. Compared with Parker Tax Pro Library or TheTaxBook, both of which sell editorial explanation cheaply, AskTomG gives primary authority with penalty framing rather than a plain-language walkthrough, and many small firms will end up carrying one of each. Bizora undercuts it on price and adds state coverage, without the memo discipline.

One-to-watch is right and is kept. The methodology and the authority tagging are genuinely differentiated, and the founders are known quantities in the EA community. What is not yet there is state law, a security attestation, any integration, and the operational depth that would let a firm bet a busy season on a two-founder product.