The Plausibility Trap
What Happened When British Accountants Became Professional Undoers of Confident Nonsense
Part One: The Year Everything Sounded Right
"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence."
— Charles Bukowski
About This Book
In 2025, UK accountants discovered what it meant to live in a world where fluency had learned to travel alone—separated from truth. This is not a story about artificial intelligence. It is a story about what happens when confidence and truth come apart, and who pays the price when they do.
Through the experiences of practitioners navigating AI-generated tax plans, phantom HMRC citations, and the peculiar misery of being right while being ignored, this book explores:
- •The Plausibility Trap: How fluency masquerades as truth in the age of AI
- •The Debunking Tax: The invisible cost of correcting confident nonsense
- •The Confidence Gap: Why automation bias makes experts seem like obstacles
- •What They Learned: Practical wisdom for navigating the new landscape
"In 2025, accountants didn't get replaced by AI. They got recruited to fight it. And in that fight, they rediscovered something that had been true all along: the most valuable skill in an age of confident machines is the willingness to say, 'Actually, that's wrong.'"
What You'll Discover
Based on surveys of 500 UK accountants, forum discussions, and first-hand accounts from 2024-2025, this book documents the year British accounting became a profession of professional undoers—and what that means for the future of work in an age of artificial intelligence.
Part Two Coming Soon
What's Coming in 2026
The story continues. Making Tax Digital arrives. The regulatory reckoning approaches. New tools promise new efficiencies—and new traps. The accountants who survived 2025 share what they're doing differently.
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