Janna Scott talks about financial literacy the way other people talk about public health. To her it is structural, systemic, a deficit that compounds with interest and lands hardest on the people least equipped to absorb it. The knowledge that would protect them exists; it has always existed. What does not exist, for most of them, is access to it. “My goal has always been to help bridge that information gap,” she says, and everything else about her—the company, the credentials, the spite—proceeds from that single sentence.

She is an accountant by temperament and an IRS Enrolled Agent by credential, a person who came up through the unglamorous machinery of government finance, years spent as a fiscal analyst for the State of Washington before she walked away over concerns about transparency. None of it was supposed to lead to a software company. “I never cared about building a software. I never cared about making money. I didn’t want to do this,” she says. She built one anyway, because the gap she had spent her career watching was about to swallow an entire new category of people whole.

DeFi Tax, her crypto tax platform, launched this spring, but it began with a question almost embarrassing in its plainness: were her clients’ crypto tax reports actually accurate? She took a single wallet and ran it through fourteen different platforms, expecting the small discrepancies any accountant learns to live with. What she got was fourteen entirely different results, some diverging by tens of thousands of dollars, every one of them generated from identical data. “Unfortunately, nobody has gotten this right so far. Even the IRS was doing their own crypto tax audits inaccurately,” she says.

Here is where the information gap stops being an abstraction. Ordinary people were paying billion-dollar companies for tools that could not agree with one another, and had no way of knowing it, because checking the math was precisely the expertise they lacked. Scott did the conscientious thing first and brought her findings to the companies themselves, offering to help. “I reached out to all the products. Most of them said, ‘Yeah, no, thanks. We’re good.’” So she built her own, and she is candid about the heat behind it. “This was about fixing it and I’m being petty. Pissing off the products that made multi-billions of dollars.” The anger is not really about the products. It is about who pays when they are wrong. “Money rules the world. Greed, right? They didn’t care about fixing it.” So she did. “I solely created that company to fix what’s broken. And there’s a lot broken.”

The thing the brochures never explain, the thing that turns literacy from self-improvement into a matter of survival, is where the burden falls when the numbers are questioned. “You have the burden of proof to show that they are wrong. They do not have the burden of proof to show you that they are right.” When a notice arrives from the IRS, no one cares what your app told you. They care what you can demonstrate, and a person who never understood the calculation in the first place has nothing to demonstrate with. The consequences are not theoretical. “It’s not the tax that is going to be the worst. It’s the penalties and interest and the liens and the levies. Our middle class is already on the edges.”

Her insistence on building DeFi Tax around comprehension rather than automation runs straight back to the same conviction. “Our product was built not by coders or blockchain developers. Our product was built by tax professionals.” Most crypto tax software treats compliance as a math problem to solve and forget; Scott treats it as something a person ought to be able to follow, line by line, and defend.

Nowhere is the mission more literal than in the scholarship she runs for students who show aptitude in math and financial problem-solving. She meets the recipients and their families personally, because to her the money was never the point. “For us, the scholarship is not simply about giving students money and moving on.” It is an attempt to hand the knowledge directly to the next people who would otherwise have to go without it.

She refuses sole credit for any of it, redirecting it toward her co-founder and COO, Aria Cissney, the steadying force who keeps the enterprise upright while Scott does what Scott does best, which is to find a problem and refuse to release it. “Honestly, without my co-founder, truly one of the most incredible women I could ever hope to work with, neither the tax firm, DeFi Tax, nor many of my other ventures would have flourished the way they have.”

She does not pretend to be a soothing presence. “Am I homicidal? Sometimes 100%. Is everybody still alive? Unfortunately, yes.” The edge is earned; she spent a long time being agreeable in rooms that mistook her courtesy for a lack of seriousness, and at some point she stopped. “This is a passion project. This is something I did because I was pissed.” For her it is less a project than a permanent condition. “I see those issues everywhere I go, which means my brain rarely stops working.” What she will not abide is the industry of noise that rushes in to fill the vacuum literacy leaves behind. “Do not believe everything the ‘social media CPA’ is telling you.” The noise is relentless, she knows, and a fair share of it is either incompetent or predatory, often both.

Ask her what actually drives her and there is no hesitation, and notably no mention of the company at all. “My passion still is tax and accounting and helping people understand their own financials to reach their goals and not be so scared of tax season.” The fear is the enemy, and the fear is downstream of not knowing.

What she keeps returning to is the strange democracy of arithmetic itself. “Numbers are universal. You don’t need to know the language, really, to work on numbers. One plus one is two. It doesn’t change.” The math, in other words, was never the hard part. The access was. Scott is building for the people who were never supposed to have this information, on the conviction that the strategies and the tools and the knowledge already exist and only want distributing. The company is the vehicle. The aim is to make the knowledge common.

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