I
Ishan Pandey
Guest
Tax professionals e-filed 73.9 million individual returns in the 2026 filing season through April 24, about 53% of everything filed electronically according to IRS statistics, while first-time CPA exam candidates fell 33% between 2016 and 2021 and Black Ore counts more than 500,000 accountants leaving the profession over five years.
Black Ore, the Austin company behind the Tax Autopilot platform, launched Black Ore for Small Firms on October 27 at Intuit Connect in Las Vegas, a version of the software that the largest firms in the country have run in production for three tax seasons. It is priced per return with no enterprise contract and no five-figure minimum, firms can be live in less than a day and finished returns arrive directly inside Intuit ProConnect Tax and Lacerte. Black Ore's small and mid-sized firm customer base has grown more than fivefold since the start of 2026. The platform reports more than 99% accuracy and up to 98% less preparation time.
The supply of tax preparers has been tightening for years. The CPA Journal reports that first-time CPA exam candidates fell 33% from 48,004 in 2016 to 32,188 in 2021 according to AICPA data, that 2022 had the fewest exam takers in 17 years and that about 75% of AICPA members are at retirement age. A Tulane accounting professor links the decline to starting salaries that trail finance and technology, the extra year of study behind the 150-hour requirement for CPA eligibility and work-life balance. Black Ore puts the exodus at more than 500,000 accountants over five years and estimates a 125 million-hour annual shortfall in US tax services worth more than $25 billion, which implies about $200 an hour of unmet demand (our arithmetic).
The pipeline has started to refill. Undergraduate accounting enrollment rose 12% in fall 2024 to 267,278 students, the highest level since fall 2020 and just below the 275,963 recorded in fall 2019 according to National Student Clearinghouse data reported by CPA Trendlines. A student who enrolls today still needs years of coursework and licensing before reaching a preparer's desk, so the rebound arrives after the next several filing seasons and not before them. Firms that need capacity this winter have to find it in their existing teams, which is the gap that automation is built to fill.
Demand for tax preparation is not shrinking. The IRS had received 142.2 million individual returns by April 24, 2026, within 0.2% of the 142.6 million at the same point in 2025. Tax professionals e-filed 73.9 million of them against 65.3 million that taxpayers prepared themselves. Professionals therefore carried about 53% of electronic filing (our arithmetic). Their volume rose 0.6% year on year while self-prepared e-filing rose 1.9%. A flat workload with a shrinking pool of preparers puts the pressure on output per person. The faster growth of do-it-yourself filing tells small practices that clients have alternatives when a firm cannot take their return.
Small practices feel this most directly. A firm of 20 people cannot add a preparer in the middle of busy season and has little room to turn away a client without losing the advisory relationship that follows the return. The same firm also lacks the technology staff and budget that let larger firms automate, so until now the best tax tools have been concentrated where resources were deepest. Automation that arrives per return and plugs into existing tax software changes that position, because the cost scales with the work a firm takes on.
Tax Autopilot takes in source documents in any format, classifies them, extracts the data, applies federal and state tax logic, prepares the return and delivers it review-ready, with every figure linked to the document it came from and items needing attention flagged for a professional. The platform handles W-2s, 1099s, K-1s and brokerage statements according to Sovereign Magazine and has covered 1040 and K-1 and K-3 work, with 1041 and 1065 modules listed as coming soon on the company's website. Around the preparation step it generates client document request lists, builds binders and workpapers, produces Excel tie-out packages, offers a review copilot that detects anomalies and keeps evidence-linked steps and exportable audit packages. The infrastructure is SOC 2 Type II certified according to CPA Practice Advisor.
The design choice that matters most is where the work ends. Firm professionals remain the final authority on sign-off, so the licensed preparer's judgment and signature stay in the workflow while the document handling and first-pass preparation move to software. Returns land directly in the tax systems firms already run. Black Ore's website lists ATX, CCH Axcess Tax, CCH ProSystem fx, Drake Tax, GoSystem Tax RS, Intuit Lacerte, Intuit ProConnect, Intuit ProSeries and UltraTax CS among supported platforms. Shinar has described the underlying language model as only about a tenth of the value, with tax-specific logic supplying the rest (Lex), which explains why the company has spent years encoding federal and state rules and not simply connecting a general model to a document folder.
Black Ore for Small Firms is available now and changes four things for a practice of any size. Pricing is per return with no enterprise contract and no five-figure minimum, firms can go live in less than a day, each firm is assigned a named Black Ore specialist with no help center queue and the product is native to Intuit ProConnect Tax and Lacerte. Firms on ProConnect Tax also receive hands-on migration support from both Intuit and Black Ore, according to TNW's contributed coverage. Eyal Shinar, the company's co-founder and CEO, describes the goal as putting powerful automation directly into smaller firms' hands inside the software they already use so they can compete with larger firms without the traditional disadvantages of scale and resources.
Each of the four changes lowers a specific barrier. Per-return pricing lets a firm pay in step with the revenue each return earns and removes a commitment that a small practice with seasonal cash flow cannot easily carry. A one-day start matters because the work is seasonal and a firm that waits for a long implementation misses the window it was trying to open. The named specialist addresses the support gap that independent firms face with large vendors. The native integration means preparers keep their screens and review habits, so adoption asks them to supervise a new first draft and not to learn a new system. Starting with the largest firms also served the product well, because K-1-heavy high-net-worth returns are among the hardest cases and the platform has been tested against them before reaching simpler small-firm filings.
Black Ore opened Tax Autopilot to broader availability on April 29, 2026 after a two-year invitation-only pilot in which 75 firms were selected from a waitlist of more than 3,700. The pilot included 40% of the 20 largest US CPA firms by revenue according to CPA Practice Advisor. That is about 49 firms waiting for every one admitted (our arithmetic). Since the start of 2026 the small and mid-sized firm customer base has grown more than fivefold, although the company has not published an absolute count. Maxwell Locke & Ritter, a top-100 firm in Austin, reports that complex high-net-worth returns with many K-1s moved from several days of preparation to review-ready in minutes. A managing director at Withum said in 2023 that firms have largely invested in other parts of their business at the expense of tax compliance and now says the platform frees billable hours for advisory work.
Early-access firms report accuracy above 99% in data extraction across tens of thousands of complex returns, an autonomy rate above 98%, preparation time saved of up to 98% and costs up to 80% lower per return, which Black Ore describes as making tax teams up to 10 times more productive. Its website adds review cycles that run more than twice as fast. Sean McLean, Chief Digital Officer at Elevate, a platform that supports independent accounting firms, says most firms lack the resources of a Big 4 firm and struggle when they build automation on their own. He set Black Ore up over a single phone call, says his preparers get back 8 to 15 hours a week that goes straight back to clients and would recommend it to any managing partner. On the website he adds that the OCR he used before was about 50% accurate. These figures are company-reported and the percentages are stated as "up to" results, so firms will want to test them on their own mix of returns.
Elevate's 8 to 15 hours a week equals 20% to 38% of a 40-hour week for each preparer (our arithmetic). If all 20 people in a firm prepared returns at that rate the practice would regain 160 to 300 hours a week, or 4 to 7.5 full-time roles of capacity, without a single hire. At the roughly $200 an hour implied by Black Ore's own shortfall estimate that capacity would be worth $32,000 to $60,000 a week, which is an illustration and not a forecast because billing rates differ by firm and service. In a realistic firm only some of the staff prepare returns, so a team where half do the work would regain 2 to 3.75 roles. Even that lower figure covers the capacity a practice of that size would otherwise need two or three new hires to create.
Former EY executive Jeff Wong frames the opportunity in terms of growth, saying CPAs who move on automation will serve more clients at higher margins with a fraction of the hours. Shinar makes a similar point in his own writing for the profession, arguing that the next few years will sort firms into those that used this period to grow and those that did not. The mechanics support both views. A firm that frees a day or more of each preparer's week can take on new returns during the season and redirect the remainder toward the planning and advisory work that clients pay for year round.
The talent data and the capacity arithmetic point to a retention effect as well as a throughput effect. The Tulane professor cited above lists work-life balance among the reasons accountants leave the profession. Tax season concentrates that pressure on preparers. A tool that returns 8 to 15 hours of each preparer's week to other work addresses one of the stated causes of attrition at the moment the profession can least afford it, so firms may find that automation helps them keep the people they already employ as well as handle more returns.
The IRS numbers add a competitive reason to move early. Self-prepared e-filing grew about three times faster than professional e-filing this season (1.9% against 0.6%), so every client a firm cannot serve in time is one that has an alternative. A practice that can promise review-ready returns faster protects the client relationship that leads to planning and advisory work, which is where Shinar argues firms can grow tax revenue with AI. Adoption risk is contained by design, since a professional signs every return and firms can run the platform on prior-year returns to compare its output with their own work before they rely on it in season.
Eyal Shinar co-founded Fundbox, the payments and credit company for small businesses that reached a valuation of about $1 billion. He served as its CEO and later executive chairman before leaving in 2021 to start Black Ore, according to his AICPA speaker profile. His bio says he scaled Fundbox from an idea to more than $200 million in annual revenue and profitability. Earlier he was a vice president at Battery Ventures leading projects and investments in finance, machine learning and SaaS. He moved to Austin in 2021 and started Black Ore in early 2022 to apply AI to financial services beginning with accounting. He named the company after black ore, a mineral he describes as essential to industrial production, because the aim is to do the same for the digital world.
Co-founder and CTO Pavel Kapovski previously led R&D at CME Group, where he developed machine-learning technology used by globally regulated banks and financial institutions (FinTech Futures). The team at launch included people from Adobe, Baker Tilly, Cisco, EY, Google, Goldman Sachs, Grant Thornton, NASA, PwC and Ramp, which pairs engineering depth with practitioners who have prepared and reviewed returns at large firms. The company spent about two years building its architecture and training its models before emerging in 2023 with a team of about 20. Shinar has said he intends to keep hiring lean because engineers are expensive.
His thesis starts from how tax work happens in practice. Firms spend large amounts of time chasing clients for documents, sorting and organizing them, extracting the numbers and checking for errors, a process Shinar calls highly manual and prone to mistakes. He argues that CPAs already know AI can raise efficiency and open room for strategic, revenue-generating work. He adds that earlier technology vendors disappointed firms by overpromising. The product's answer is to take the preparation workload and keep a licensed professional on every sign-off. Black Ore has also said it plans to extend the platform beyond tax into wealth management, financial advisory and planning and insurance services, with tax as the first proof point.
Black Ore emerged from stealth in November 2023 with $60 million, co-led by a16z and Oak HC/FT with General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Trust Ventures, LionBird, SciFiVC and SV Angel participating. Angels included Vikram Pandit, the former CEO of Citigroup, Tom Glocer, the former CEO of Thomson Reuters, Max Levchin, the founder of PayPal and Affirm, Jason Gardner, the founder of Marqeta, Mark Britto, the former EVP and Chief Product Officer at PayPal and Gokul Rajaram, a board member and executive at DoorDash, Square, Coinbase and Pinterest. Bloomberg described the round as a combined seed and Series A and noted that the company declined to share a valuation. Typical seed and Series A rounds at the time were under $20 million according to PitchBook, so the size signaled investor conviction that AI could take over a large share of professional-services work.
Oak HC/FT's stated rationale was that financial services revenue is rising while labor problems have grown alongside it, with manual administrative work, legacy technology, an aging workforce and fewer young professionals limiting how many clients firms can serve. That diagnosis matches the data in the first two charts. The category has attracted further capital since. In February 2026 Basis, which builds AI agents for accounting firms across advisory, tax and audit, raised $100 million in a Series B led by Accel at a $1.15 billion valuation and says about 30% of the top 25 accounting firms use its platform. Khosla Ventures backs both companies. The pace of investment shows how seriously investors take the shift of accounting work toward autonomous software. No further Black Ore round has been announced since the 2023 financing.
The next filing season will be the first in which small firms can run the same autonomous preparation that large firms have used for three seasons. Firms that go live this autumn will have time to test it on prior-year returns before volume arrives. Black Ore has more to add, with 1041 and 1065 modules listed as coming soon and a stated plan to build products for wealth management, financial advisory and insurance. The larger shift is in what a small practice can be. A firm of 20 that can take on more clients without adding headcount competes on advisory depth and client service and not on the number of preparers it can hire. With a growing waitlist and a customer base that grew more than fivefold this year, Black Ore is positioned to supply that capacity to the part of the profession that has the most to gain from it.
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Vested Interest Disclosure: HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYOR.
Black Ore, the Austin company behind the Tax Autopilot platform, launched Black Ore for Small Firms on October 27 at Intuit Connect in Las Vegas, a version of the software that the largest firms in the country have run in production for three tax seasons. It is priced per return with no enterprise contract and no five-figure minimum, firms can be live in less than a day and finished returns arrive directly inside Intuit ProConnect Tax and Lacerte. Black Ore's small and mid-sized firm customer base has grown more than fivefold since the start of 2026. The platform reports more than 99% accuracy and up to 98% less preparation time.
Accounting Talent Supply and the Tax Preparation Gap
The supply of tax preparers has been tightening for years. The CPA Journal reports that first-time CPA exam candidates fell 33% from 48,004 in 2016 to 32,188 in 2021 according to AICPA data, that 2022 had the fewest exam takers in 17 years and that about 75% of AICPA members are at retirement age. A Tulane accounting professor links the decline to starting salaries that trail finance and technology, the extra year of study behind the 150-hour requirement for CPA eligibility and work-life balance. Black Ore puts the exodus at more than 500,000 accountants over five years and estimates a 125 million-hour annual shortfall in US tax services worth more than $25 billion, which implies about $200 an hour of unmet demand (our arithmetic).
The pipeline has started to refill. Undergraduate accounting enrollment rose 12% in fall 2024 to 267,278 students, the highest level since fall 2020 and just below the 275,963 recorded in fall 2019 according to National Student Clearinghouse data reported by CPA Trendlines. A student who enrolls today still needs years of coursework and licensing before reaching a preparer's desk, so the rebound arrives after the next several filing seasons and not before them. Firms that need capacity this winter have to find it in their existing teams, which is the gap that automation is built to fill.
Tax Season Volume and the Role of Professional Preparers
Demand for tax preparation is not shrinking. The IRS had received 142.2 million individual returns by April 24, 2026, within 0.2% of the 142.6 million at the same point in 2025. Tax professionals e-filed 73.9 million of them against 65.3 million that taxpayers prepared themselves. Professionals therefore carried about 53% of electronic filing (our arithmetic). Their volume rose 0.6% year on year while self-prepared e-filing rose 1.9%. A flat workload with a shrinking pool of preparers puts the pressure on output per person. The faster growth of do-it-yourself filing tells small practices that clients have alternatives when a firm cannot take their return.
Small practices feel this most directly. A firm of 20 people cannot add a preparer in the middle of busy season and has little room to turn away a client without losing the advisory relationship that follows the return. The same firm also lacks the technology staff and budget that let larger firms automate, so until now the best tax tools have been concentrated where resources were deepest. Automation that arrives per return and plugs into existing tax software changes that position, because the cost scales with the work a firm takes on.
How the Tax Autopilot Platform Works
Tax Autopilot takes in source documents in any format, classifies them, extracts the data, applies federal and state tax logic, prepares the return and delivers it review-ready, with every figure linked to the document it came from and items needing attention flagged for a professional. The platform handles W-2s, 1099s, K-1s and brokerage statements according to Sovereign Magazine and has covered 1040 and K-1 and K-3 work, with 1041 and 1065 modules listed as coming soon on the company's website. Around the preparation step it generates client document request lists, builds binders and workpapers, produces Excel tie-out packages, offers a review copilot that detects anomalies and keeps evidence-linked steps and exportable audit packages. The infrastructure is SOC 2 Type II certified according to CPA Practice Advisor.
The design choice that matters most is where the work ends. Firm professionals remain the final authority on sign-off, so the licensed preparer's judgment and signature stay in the workflow while the document handling and first-pass preparation move to software. Returns land directly in the tax systems firms already run. Black Ore's website lists ATX, CCH Axcess Tax, CCH ProSystem fx, Drake Tax, GoSystem Tax RS, Intuit Lacerte, Intuit ProConnect, Intuit ProSeries and UltraTax CS among supported platforms. Shinar has described the underlying language model as only about a tenth of the value, with tax-specific logic supplying the rest (Lex), which explains why the company has spent years encoding federal and state rules and not simply connecting a general model to a document folder.
The Small-Firm Launch and the Intuit Integration
Black Ore for Small Firms is available now and changes four things for a practice of any size. Pricing is per return with no enterprise contract and no five-figure minimum, firms can go live in less than a day, each firm is assigned a named Black Ore specialist with no help center queue and the product is native to Intuit ProConnect Tax and Lacerte. Firms on ProConnect Tax also receive hands-on migration support from both Intuit and Black Ore, according to TNW's contributed coverage. Eyal Shinar, the company's co-founder and CEO, describes the goal as putting powerful automation directly into smaller firms' hands inside the software they already use so they can compete with larger firms without the traditional disadvantages of scale and resources.
Each of the four changes lowers a specific barrier. Per-return pricing lets a firm pay in step with the revenue each return earns and removes a commitment that a small practice with seasonal cash flow cannot easily carry. A one-day start matters because the work is seasonal and a firm that waits for a long implementation misses the window it was trying to open. The named specialist addresses the support gap that independent firms face with large vendors. The native integration means preparers keep their screens and review habits, so adoption asks them to supervise a new first draft and not to learn a new system. Starting with the largest firms also served the product well, because K-1-heavy high-net-worth returns are among the hardest cases and the platform has been tested against them before reaching simpler small-firm filings.
Customer Traction and Reported Results
Black Ore opened Tax Autopilot to broader availability on April 29, 2026 after a two-year invitation-only pilot in which 75 firms were selected from a waitlist of more than 3,700. The pilot included 40% of the 20 largest US CPA firms by revenue according to CPA Practice Advisor. That is about 49 firms waiting for every one admitted (our arithmetic). Since the start of 2026 the small and mid-sized firm customer base has grown more than fivefold, although the company has not published an absolute count. Maxwell Locke & Ritter, a top-100 firm in Austin, reports that complex high-net-worth returns with many K-1s moved from several days of preparation to review-ready in minutes. A managing director at Withum said in 2023 that firms have largely invested in other parts of their business at the expense of tax compliance and now says the platform frees billable hours for advisory work.
Early-access firms report accuracy above 99% in data extraction across tens of thousands of complex returns, an autonomy rate above 98%, preparation time saved of up to 98% and costs up to 80% lower per return, which Black Ore describes as making tax teams up to 10 times more productive. Its website adds review cycles that run more than twice as fast. Sean McLean, Chief Digital Officer at Elevate, a platform that supports independent accounting firms, says most firms lack the resources of a Big 4 firm and struggle when they build automation on their own. He set Black Ore up over a single phone call, says his preparers get back 8 to 15 hours a week that goes straight back to clients and would recommend it to any managing partner. On the website he adds that the OCR he used before was about 50% accurate. These figures are company-reported and the percentages are stated as "up to" results, so firms will want to test them on their own mix of returns.
Capacity Economics for a 20-Person Firm
Elevate's 8 to 15 hours a week equals 20% to 38% of a 40-hour week for each preparer (our arithmetic). If all 20 people in a firm prepared returns at that rate the practice would regain 160 to 300 hours a week, or 4 to 7.5 full-time roles of capacity, without a single hire. At the roughly $200 an hour implied by Black Ore's own shortfall estimate that capacity would be worth $32,000 to $60,000 a week, which is an illustration and not a forecast because billing rates differ by firm and service. In a realistic firm only some of the staff prepare returns, so a team where half do the work would regain 2 to 3.75 roles. Even that lower figure covers the capacity a practice of that size would otherwise need two or three new hires to create.
Former EY executive Jeff Wong frames the opportunity in terms of growth, saying CPAs who move on automation will serve more clients at higher margins with a fraction of the hours. Shinar makes a similar point in his own writing for the profession, arguing that the next few years will sort firms into those that used this period to grow and those that did not. The mechanics support both views. A firm that frees a day or more of each preparer's week can take on new returns during the season and redirect the remainder toward the planning and advisory work that clients pay for year round.
Implications for Independent Practices
The talent data and the capacity arithmetic point to a retention effect as well as a throughput effect. The Tulane professor cited above lists work-life balance among the reasons accountants leave the profession. Tax season concentrates that pressure on preparers. A tool that returns 8 to 15 hours of each preparer's week to other work addresses one of the stated causes of attrition at the moment the profession can least afford it, so firms may find that automation helps them keep the people they already employ as well as handle more returns.
The IRS numbers add a competitive reason to move early. Self-prepared e-filing grew about three times faster than professional e-filing this season (1.9% against 0.6%), so every client a firm cannot serve in time is one that has an alternative. A practice that can promise review-ready returns faster protects the client relationship that leads to planning and advisory work, which is where Shinar argues firms can grow tax revenue with AI. Adoption risk is contained by design, since a professional signs every return and firms can run the platform on prior-year returns to compare its output with their own work before they rely on it in season.
Founders and Leadership
Eyal Shinar co-founded Fundbox, the payments and credit company for small businesses that reached a valuation of about $1 billion. He served as its CEO and later executive chairman before leaving in 2021 to start Black Ore, according to his AICPA speaker profile. His bio says he scaled Fundbox from an idea to more than $200 million in annual revenue and profitability. Earlier he was a vice president at Battery Ventures leading projects and investments in finance, machine learning and SaaS. He moved to Austin in 2021 and started Black Ore in early 2022 to apply AI to financial services beginning with accounting. He named the company after black ore, a mineral he describes as essential to industrial production, because the aim is to do the same for the digital world.
Co-founder and CTO Pavel Kapovski previously led R&D at CME Group, where he developed machine-learning technology used by globally regulated banks and financial institutions (FinTech Futures). The team at launch included people from Adobe, Baker Tilly, Cisco, EY, Google, Goldman Sachs, Grant Thornton, NASA, PwC and Ramp, which pairs engineering depth with practitioners who have prepared and reviewed returns at large firms. The company spent about two years building its architecture and training its models before emerging in 2023 with a team of about 20. Shinar has said he intends to keep hiring lean because engineers are expensive.
His thesis starts from how tax work happens in practice. Firms spend large amounts of time chasing clients for documents, sorting and organizing them, extracting the numbers and checking for errors, a process Shinar calls highly manual and prone to mistakes. He argues that CPAs already know AI can raise efficiency and open room for strategic, revenue-generating work. He adds that earlier technology vendors disappointed firms by overpromising. The product's answer is to take the preparation workload and keep a licensed professional on every sign-off. Black Ore has also said it plans to extend the platform beyond tax into wealth management, financial advisory and planning and insurance services, with tax as the first proof point.
Investors and Funding History
Black Ore emerged from stealth in November 2023 with $60 million, co-led by a16z and Oak HC/FT with General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Trust Ventures, LionBird, SciFiVC and SV Angel participating. Angels included Vikram Pandit, the former CEO of Citigroup, Tom Glocer, the former CEO of Thomson Reuters, Max Levchin, the founder of PayPal and Affirm, Jason Gardner, the founder of Marqeta, Mark Britto, the former EVP and Chief Product Officer at PayPal and Gokul Rajaram, a board member and executive at DoorDash, Square, Coinbase and Pinterest. Bloomberg described the round as a combined seed and Series A and noted that the company declined to share a valuation. Typical seed and Series A rounds at the time were under $20 million according to PitchBook, so the size signaled investor conviction that AI could take over a large share of professional-services work.
Oak HC/FT's stated rationale was that financial services revenue is rising while labor problems have grown alongside it, with manual administrative work, legacy technology, an aging workforce and fewer young professionals limiting how many clients firms can serve. That diagnosis matches the data in the first two charts. The category has attracted further capital since. In February 2026 Basis, which builds AI agents for accounting firms across advisory, tax and audit, raised $100 million in a Series B led by Accel at a $1.15 billion valuation and says about 30% of the top 25 accounting firms use its platform. Khosla Ventures backs both companies. The pace of investment shows how seriously investors take the shift of accounting work toward autonomous software. No further Black Ore round has been announced since the 2023 financing.
What Comes Next
The next filing season will be the first in which small firms can run the same autonomous preparation that large firms have used for three seasons. Firms that go live this autumn will have time to test it on prior-year returns before volume arrives. Black Ore has more to add, with 1041 and 1065 modules listed as coming soon and a stated plan to build products for wealth management, financial advisory and insurance. The larger shift is in what a small practice can be. A firm of 20 that can take on more clients without adding headcount competes on advisory depth and client service and not on the number of preparers it can hire. With a growing waitlist and a customer base that grew more than fivefold this year, Black Ore is positioned to supply that capacity to the part of the profession that has the most to gain from it.
Don’t forget to like and share the story!
Vested Interest Disclosure: HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYOR.