Is your spouse an independent contractor? Do you own a home? Do you have stock options? Do you have a home office? These alone are enough to make some pretty creative reporting situations.

Those questions all have discrete answers, including the much-misunderstood home office. The correct tax outcomes are very much deterministic, in the sense that the same inputs always result in the same outputs. It's simply that there are a lot of options to change the inputs (for example, choosing FIFO vs LIFO for stock sales, using an S-corp vs a sole proprietorship for a personal business).

For example, the home office deduction is only available to individuals who have a home office that is used exclusively for their individual business, not as an employee for someone else's business (the only exception being for flow-through entities where the taxpayer is a shareholder/partner). The "exclusive use" is meant in the all-or-nothing sense. Use your office computer after hours for games? The home office deduction no longer applies. Uses the office space to store personal documents, or really any other activity except for the business activity? The HOD no longer applies. Don't have any income from that business activity you claim are doing in the home office? The HOD no longer applies.

It's simply that enforcement is not deterministic, so people think they get away with a lot of positions that do not survive actual audits. Talk to an IRS agent that handles audits and you'll learn that a failed home office deduction claim is the #2 adjustment to the tax returns of white collar professionals.[1] At a relatively recent tax mixer, IRS agents from the Los Angeles branch office could only recall about a dozen cases in which the home office deduction actually survived an audit, out of thousands, and those taxpayers were extremely rigorous about following the rules to the letter (to the extent that all of them locked their home offices when they were not being used for work).

[1] The #1 reason for adjustments to the tax returns of white collar professionals is attempting to claim business expense deductions without matching business income to deduct against. Technically, the home office deduction is one of these deductions, which is why it is #2 and not #1.

There are also a lot of non-deterministinc choices one can make. Things like carry forward losses or gains, that no algorithm could know. They depend on your personal plans for the future. You can make specific filing choices that have massive consequences on your future. There are choices like 83(b) elections that can save you tens of millions of dollars a decade in the future, contingent on the events after you file.