What taxes apply when money moves between you and someone else?
Tell the tool which side you're on and what your relationship is. It tells you, in plain language, which taxes apply to your paycheck or invoice, what each side owes, and what you'll do about it come tax day. Every number traces back to a public source.
What this tool does
You hire a nanny. You pay a freelance designer. You're a contractor invoicing a client. In every case, money moves from one party to another, and the tax math depends on the relationship — not just the dollar amount. The same $1,000 means different things if it's a 1099 contractor payment versus a household-employee paycheck versus a W-2 wage. Different taxes apply, different sides owe them, different forms are filed.
Compliance Ledger answers a single question: given who you are, where you are, what your relationship is, and how much is moving — what taxes apply, what does each side do, and what should you set aside? It's a research tool, not a filing service. The numbers are decision-quality, ballpark, and honest about what's verified versus what's still being verified.
Who it's for
Anyone whose work depends on knowing whether a number is right.
- Freelancers and contractors who want to know how much to set aside for self-employment tax before they spend the check.
- Household employers hiring nannies, housekeepers, gardeners — the IRS rules differ from regular employment, and the costs to the employer aren't always obvious.
- Anyone hiring who needs to know whether they should be running a 1099, a W-2, or a Schedule H.
- People preparing for tax day who want a sanity check before they sit down with a CPA or tax software.
- Auditors and accountants who want every line of math to come with a source.
How the trust layer works
Every number in the tool is either verified — read from a fact in the live ledger that has been hand-checked against the source page, byte-hashed, and signed by a named human — or blueprint: the source URL is real, the math is correct, but the verbatim quote and hash haven't been ritualized yet. The tool labels every line with which it is. It will never silently elevate a blueprint into a verified claim. When the verification ritual completes for a source, the badge swaps automatically.
The trust layer is what makes "ballpark" actually useful. Anyone reading a number from the tool can click through to the .gov page it came from and read the exact text the math depends on. That's not how typical tax tools work — most show you a number and ask you to trust it.
What's verified today
One state, one relationship: Illinois household-employee state withholding. The flat 4.95% rate and the voluntary-withholding rule are both end-to-end verified — sourced from the Illinois Department of Revenue, byte-hashed, signed. The rest of the demo (Texas, federal FICA/FUTA, the W-2 and 1099 paths, Additional Medicare, and every benefit modifier) renders against blueprint citations. Each will flip to verified as the verification ritual is run on its source.
Read the numbers programmatically
The same data that powers the tool is available as a public REST API, no auth required beyond a publishable key. See the API reference.
What's coming
More states. More relationships (statutory employees, gig-economy variants). A community verification model so a single person isn't the bottleneck. An MCP server so AI agents can query the ledger as a tool, not by scraping. The data structure is designed for all of this — adding a state will become filling a few JSON rows, not writing new code.