LlamaIndex says frontier VLMs still struggle parsing tax and W-series forms

LlamaIndex argues that frontier vision-language models still fail on real forms such as W-2s, 1040s, W-9s, and scanned W-4s, because forms require detecting every field, preserving section hierarchy, linking values to their exact boxes, and reading handwriting and checkmarks.

The company's blog post details these failure modes and presents a custom cookbook for LlamaParse as a cheaper way to handle such forms.