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| Alyssa Maloof Whatley |
That idea drove Alyssa Maloof Whatley, director of tax controversy at Frost Law, to develop EasAly, which helps taxpayers evaluate IRS collection options using transcript data and other financial information, and shortly after, CovidTaxRefunds.com, which assists people who may be entitled to pandemic-era refunds or abatements.
In her view, the platforms are designed to handle standardized, repeatable problems at a lower cost while allowing attorneys and other professionals to step in when a case becomes more complicated.
While the IRS offers resolution programs, understanding those options often requires navigating dense government materials that are challenging for those who are not tax experts to understand, she said, and hiring a tax professional or legal counsel may be too expensive.
At the same time, these taxpayers may not qualify for free legal assistance through low-income taxpayer clinics, according to Maloof Whatley.
The only option left is private tax relief companies, she said, many of which are sales driven and may come with concerns about the quality of advice provided.
In February, Maloof Whatley, with a team of experts, launched EasAly, developed with a combination of hard coding and AI. The platform uses an application programming interface that — with a taxpayer's authorization through IRS Form 8821 – can retrieve tax records from the IRS transcript delivery system.
Individuals can also upload their financial information to determine how they can pay back the IRS, including which settlement program best suits their situation, according to Maloof Whatley, who likened the procedure to a bank's mortgage application process.
The goal of EasAly is to "provide users with accessible information tailored to their individual circumstances so they can identify potential solutions without immediately turning to costly professional representation," she said.
While most collection cases can be wrapped up without human legal intervention, issues can be escalated, Maloof Whatley said. EasAly will refer clients to prescreened attorneys and certified public accountants in her network, according to the website.
Building on the same technology, Maloof Whatley and her team later launched another platform, CovidTaxRefunds.com, in response to the federal claims court's November decision in Kwong v. USA
.That claims court decision allowed a California business owner to recover penalties and interest he had tried to get refunded during the COVID-19 pandemic — and challenged an interpretation that offered potential relief for others. Eligible taxpayers have until July 10 to file a refund or an abatement.
As the IRS rapidly adopts innovative technologies to improve efficiency, she said, working-class taxpayers are at risk of getting lost in a more technology-driven bureaucracy.
"They're the most vulnerable because those are the people that the government automates the collection system for," Maloof Whatley said, noting that IRS collection actions entail bank levies and wage garnishments.
More important than ever are affordable tools that help people understand their options, defend their rights and pursue appropriate resolutions, she said.
"The only way I can see forward for that is technology," she said.
In this interview, Maloof Whatley shares more about why she created EasAly and CovidTaxRefunds.com and the challenges that come with integrating AI with taxpayer information.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What motivated you to launch EasAly and CovidTaxRefunds.com?
My motivation is personal. I began my career in a low-income taxpayer clinic before opening my own tax controversy firm. In both settings, I kept seeing the same thing: a large, underserved middle. More than 18.6 million Americans are struggling with back taxes. Many of them earn too much to qualify for a low-income clinic, but their problem is not complex or large enough to justify hiring a big law firm.
They are frustrated. They have very few affordable ways to get accurate guidance, and too often the only place left to turn is a nationwide tax resolution firm.
That is where the trust problem lives. I do not want to paint everyone in tax resolution with one brush, but the dominant model leans on salespeople who work on fear and frustration, charge large upfront fees and too often deliver little in the way of results. Many of those firms cannot legally provide tax, legal or bankruptcy advice, which is frequently exactly what the taxpayer needs.
The process is opaque, and that lack of transparency is the root cause of people's distrust of the space.
What is the insight that led to EasAly?
Resolving a tax problem revolves around data. Once you have a taxpayer's actual IRS data, the collection work is largely a matter of running their specific facts and circumstances through the available options — their balance, their collection statute deadlines, their ability to pay — and identifying the right path.
Technology can do that accurately, at scale, and with no vested interest in the outcome. EasAly does not make more money by steering someone into one program over another. Its only job is to get each taxpayer to the option that genuinely fits their facts. That alignment is the whole point.
The timing matters because the government keeps modernizing. That automated enforcement often targets the most vulnerable. Anyone banking on recent staff reductions to fly under the radar is misreading the moment.
The government is deploying sophisticated technology to pursue noncompliance, and Americans deserve equally sophisticated tools to understand their rights, access their own data and respond through lawful channels — at a price that does not put access out of reach.
That is what EasAly was built to do. We pull a taxpayer's actual IRS data, analyze their situation, identify the relief option best suited to them and walk them through exactly how to act on it — and for taxpayers in active collection.
How about CovidTaxRefunds.com?
CovidTaxRefunds.com grew out of the same access problem. Under the recent Kwong ruling, many taxpayers are owed a federal refund or abatement they have no idea about.
But small claims like these historically never get filed because paying a professional to prepare one was never cost-effective relative to the recovery.
Technology changes that math. Anyone can check what they may be owed for free, and for claims under $75,000 we prepare a prefilled Form 843 tailored to their transcripts, with step-by-step filing instructions for their assigned IRS service center, starting at $79 and ready to self-file. Same principle in both: access and clear guidance, at a price that finally makes sense.
How does the platform harness AI to help taxpayers resolve their IRS collection issues?
It starts with data. EasAly securely pulls IRS transcripts and decodes balances, liens, penalties and deadlines into a plain-language dashboard, so a taxpayer can finally see exactly where they stand.
From there, the platform does the heavy lifting that overwhelms most people. "Aly," our real-time guide, explains IRS letters in plain English and walks users step-by-step through their options.
The "Relief Pathfinder" function compares every eligible IRS program — installment agreements, offers in compromise, currently-not-collectible status — side by side against the taxpayer's real financial picture, which we standardize to IRS collection rules to calculate a realistic ability to pay and the relevant collection statute deadlines.
Ongoing transcript monitoring and alerts keep people from getting blindsided, and for active collection, the platform helps stop it. EasAly handles the decoding and the math.
For complex cases, users hand off seamlessly to a vetted attorney or CPA by adding a professional. We are not replacing professional judgment. We are removing the fog and the automation gap that keeps people from acting.
How does your role at Frost Law intersect with the two platforms?
The two are inseparable — the platforms are a direct product of the work. I spent eight years running my own tax controversy firm. Now, at Frost Law, I see these problems at ground level every single day: the notices, the enforcement activity, the clients who only found us after a bad experience somewhere else. I'm talking to working-class Americans who are genuinely struggling and get buried by a system that is complex, intimidating and increasingly automated.
After years of sitting across from those taxpayers, the pattern becomes impossible to ignore: the vast majority of them have the same handful of issues, and the path to resolving them follows the same logic every time.
That is precisely the kind of work technology can carry at scale. That hands-on controversy experience is the backbone of what the platforms automate.
EasAly encodes the exact analysis I run for a client: pull the data, read the transcripts, map the facts and circumstances against the available options, and find the right path.
CovidTaxRefunds.com rests on the same body of case law the firm has been at the forefront of, including Kwong and Abdo v. Commissioner. The platforms take that expertise and put it into a scalable, self-serve form so it can reach the people who could never afford to walk through our door in the first place.
None of this replaces the firm. The platforms extend it. The technology handles the cases that follow a clear, repeatable pattern and makes accurate guidance affordable for taxpayers who have nowhere else to turn. When a case is genuinely complex, a firm or a professional is right there as the escalation point.
What challenges have you and your team encountered in the rollout of the two platforms?
The challenges really fall into three buckets: skepticism of AI, skepticism of tax relief and the technical reality of relying on IRS data.
The first is that AI carries a negative connotation right now. A lot of people don't like it and don't trust it. That's understandable, given how much of the media attention around it is negative.
But that's exactly the perception we're working to change, because technology and AI can also be a force for good — used to create access, affordability and transparency, and to help people actually resolve their problems faster.
The second is that people simply aren't used to turning to a platform to handle something this difficult and personal. Resolving a tax problem is stressful, and getting started means handing over sensitive personal information such as a driver's license and Social Security number to get the data we need. In an era of constant online and cyber scams, that's a real and reasonable hesitation, especially with a newer company and brand that people haven't heard of yet.
So a lot of our work is education: explaining clearly how the platform works, being transparent about my intentions and the legal expertise behind it, and walking users through the process directly so they feel comfortable and in control every step of the way.
The third is trust in tax resolution itself. People have been conditioned to expect a sales trap the moment they engage with anything labeled "tax relief." So earning credibility with transparent, flat pricing instead of fear-based upsells has been central to everything we do.
Then there's the technical side, which is genuinely hard. We rely on IRS transcript data: secure access, accurate decoding and keeping pace with how the IRS formats and updates records inside a heavily automated system. But that data is not always correct and not always available.
Just recently, the IRS had an issue where several very important transaction codes disappeared from users' transcript data for more than a month. Because our algorithm depends on that data, it was producing inaccurate results, so we held those outputs until the IRS corrected the problem on their end.
The agency's transcript service is also frequently down or unreachable. Technology can be powerful, but we are heavily dependent on a system that doesn't always function reliably, and building around that has been a constant discipline.
Finally, CovidTaxRefunds.com added the challenge of speed. We're operating with a very short statutory deadline, with the earliest being July 10, 2026, so we had to build and launch responsibly while a hard deadline counts down.
What are the main lessons you and your team have learned so far?
The biggest lesson surprised us: Leading with AI and technology, from a brand and marketing standpoint, is not what the market actually wants. People are drawn to the capability, but what they respond to is human interaction — guidance, and the ability to relate to a real person.
The educational videos are what build that connection, and we've leaned into it heavily. CovidTaxRefunds.com now has video guidance throughout the platform that walks users through each step. Users tell us again and again that they love the written and video explainers. So the lesson is that the technology has to be in service of a human experience, not the headline. AI does the heavy lifting in the background, but the face of it is a person they can trust.
Closely related is the appetite for clarity is enormous. The most powerful moment for a user is not a flashy feature — it is seeing their full IRS picture, or their refund opportunity, laid out plainly and understandably for the first time.
And third, trust is the product. In a space built on fear and opacity, leading with transparency and genuine education is both the right thing to do and the real competitive advantage.
What success stories have emerged from users of either platform?
The early results have been deeply gratifying. On CovidTaxRefunds.com, we've already had hundreds of users get their results and self-file their own claims — ranging from around $1,000 to over $100,000 — all through the same straightforward process.
That's exactly the point. A six-figure claim and a four-figure claim move through identical steps, so the taxpayer with the smaller refund gets the same quality of guidance as everyone else.
On the EasAly side, users are going through the platform start to finish, completing the process and confidently choosing the relief program that actually fits their situation.
But the success story I value most isn't a number — it's the people. I've had the honor of talking directly with everyday, hardworking Americans who use our platforms, hearing what's working, where we can make it better, and how much it means to them that we built this. That feedback is the real measure of success, and it's what tells me we're solving a problem that genuinely matters.
Any upcoming updates for either platform?
We're always adding new features, smoothing out the process, and creating more video and written content to guide users. For CovidTaxRefunds.com, the immediate priority is the July 10, 2026, deadline: making sure every eligible taxpayer can check their eligibility for free and protect their rights before that window closes.
Beyond that, we're continuing to expand the tools available both to taxpayers and to the professionals who serve them. And we're especially excited about launching a web-based version of EasAly, as well as a practitioner version, which will make the platform even more accessible and meet people wherever they are. The through line for everything on the roadmap is the same — more access, more clarity, and a smoother path for taxpayers to take control of their situation.
--Editing by Neil Cohen.
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