Approved work
The firm's own versioned definition of a useful class of tax or accounting work: who may ask, which systems it may draw on, what may be joined and computed, what may leave, and which actions may follow.
Updated July 2026
A Work Definition is the firm's own versioned policy program for one useful class of accounting or tax work. It states the outcome and everything the system may do to reach it. Purpose is executable authority rather than descriptive metadata: it compiles before anything is retrieved, and a request that falls outside it stops there.
What a definition states
- the outcome, in the language of the job;
- who may ask: roles, named employees, delegated applications;
- which systems and document types it may draw on;
- which records may be connected across systems, and on what terms;
- what may be computed and inferred;
- which processing route each part of the work takes;
- what may be released, to which destination and processor;
- which actions may follow, and at what consequence;
- what the record must contain, and how long each class is kept.
The same authority and execution boundary serves an employee asking inside an assistant, an agent the firm builds for itself, and a versioned Work API.
The governed purpose vocabulary
| Purpose | Authorizes |
|---|---|
tax_preparation | Work that directly prepares the client's return |
tax_review | Review, diagnostics and preparer handoff on that return |
tax_planning | Planning inside the authorized engagement |
tax_notice_response | Intake of an IRS or state notice and the response it requires |
tax_research_for_engagement | Research bound to one engagement question |
engagement_administration | Requirements, status, assignments and deadlines |
client_communication_for_tax_work | Communication carrying that work to the client |
consented_non_tax_use | A non-tax use with a named consent or authority record on file |
customer_authorized_other_use | A use the firm has separately authorized under its own policy |
prohibited_non_tax_use | Nothing. It is where a request lands once it leaves the engagement |
An employee phrases the request any way they like. Free text describes an outcome; it cannot mint a purpose class. Neither model output nor the text of a retrieved document can widen one.
Both halves of the rule
Section 7216 governs disclosure and use. The customer-local compilation boundary answers disclosure. Purpose-bound policy answers use, and use is the half that no amount of protection at the boundary can reach.
Cross-selling from return data, training a general model on client data, analyzing returns for third-party financial products, and letting one client's information influence another client's work are all violations with no transmission at all. Consent remains genuinely required for them.
A request whose purpose falls outside the engagement does not compile, before anything is retrieved or derived. Where a purpose requires a consent or another authority, the definition requires that reference before the work runs. IRC section 7216 and the disclosure boundary sets out the statute.
Proxara does not provide tax or legal advice. Firms should confirm the treatment of their own workflows with their counsel.
The reference accounting work families
- missing-document determination and follow-up;
- document intake, extraction, classification and tax-system mapping;
- engagement status and preparer handoff;
- return review and diagnostics;
- tax memorandum and engagement-specific research;
- IRS or state notice intake and response drafting;
- extension and deadline work;
- client communication and practice-management updates;
- explicitly consented non-tax work where firm policy permits it.
How a definition changes
A definition moves through draft, simulation against representative data, review, activation, supersession, rollback and disable, and keeps its revision history throughout. Simulation exercises purpose, release, the private artifact, actions and failure behavior without changing anything in a provider.
A policy change never rewrites a completed piece of work. A superseded definition still explains the work that ran under it.
Where to go next
| To understand | Read |
|---|---|
| Which systems a definition can name | The systems Connect joins |
| Where each part of the work runs | Where each part of the work runs |
| What the model receives | What the model sees |
| What one piece of work leaves behind | The record |