Lou is software. It does not give tax advice and it does not review, sign or file your return. You sign your own return, and you are responsible for it. Check every number against your documents before you file. Every result Lou produces carries a reminder to do this.
Lou flags situations that need judgment, and it handles many common ones. Consider a qualified cross-border tax professional if you have a complex business or rental property, large or complex investments, foreign trusts or corporations, an estate, a recent move between countries, past years that were not filed, or any situation where Lou tells you it is unsure. The review package in Lou is designed to hand to a professional.
Tax amounts, tables and form field mappings come from official IRS forms and instructions and CRA documents. Tax rates and limits are specific to each tax year, and Lou supports only the years it lists. Rules change, and some points have no clear official answer. Where that is the case Lou shows a note instead of picking quietly. Reading a photo or scan is never perfect, so Lou marks uncertain values "Please check" for you to confirm.
Lou does not send anything to the IRS, the CRA or FinCEN, and is not an IRS authorized e-file provider. You mail or e-file the forms yourself. The FBAR (FinCEN Form 114) can only be filed by you through FinCEN BSA E-Filing. Lou gives you a worksheet to copy from.
Lou is made by Big Time Design and Communication Inc. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by the Internal Revenue Service, the US Department of the Treasury, FinCEN, the Canada Revenue Agency or the Governments of the United States or Canada. Their names and form names are used only to identify the documents Lou works with. Official IRS forms are public domain US government works.
Lou includes open source software, including pdf.js (Apache 2.0), pdf-lib (MIT), Tesseract OCR via tesseract.js (Apache 2.0) and React (MIT). The license text for each is included with the software.
If you think a number, rule or form is wrong, please tell us at info@bigtimedesign.ca with the tax year and what you expected. Source code and open issues are on GitHub.