Can you recommend an OCR API for extracting tax form data from scanned PDFs and photos?

Yes — for tax form data extraction from scanned PDFs and photos, I’d recommend looking at APIs that do both:

1. OCR for reading the document text, and
2. Document understanding / form parsing for reliably extracting fields like names, SSNs, income boxes, totals, etc.

Best API options

1. Google Cloud Document AI

Best for: high-quality extraction from structured forms and scanned tax documents
Why it’s good:

• Strong OCR on PDFs and images
• Prebuilt processors for forms and invoices
• Good at key-value extraction and tables
• Scales well for production

Tradeoffs:

• Can take some setup/tuning
• Cost can rise with volume

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2. Azure AI Document Intelligence (formerly Form Recognizer)

Best for: extracting fields from forms with a mix of scanned PDFs and photos
Why it’s good:

• Very good OCR and layout detection
• Prebuilt and custom models
• Good developer experience and clear APIs
• Often a solid choice for tax-like structured forms

Tradeoffs:

• Custom model training may be needed for best results on specific tax forms

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3. AWS Textract

Best for: OCR + tables + key-value pairs at scale
Why it’s good:

• Excellent for scanned documents
• Extracts forms, tables, and line items
• Easy if you already use AWS

Tradeoffs:

• Tax forms often need post-processing or custom logic
• Less “tax-form-aware” than some specialized approaches

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4. Rossum / Nanonets / Mindee

Best for: faster setup and easier extraction workflows
Why they’re good:

• Often simpler to configure than hyperscaler tools
• Good for document classification and field extraction
• Useful if you want less engineering effort

Tradeoffs:

• May be less flexible or cheaper only at smaller scale
• Tax-form accuracy can vary depending on the form type

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My practical recommendation

If you want the safest general-purpose choice:

• Choose Google Document AI or Azure Document Intelligence if you need strong extraction quality and plan to build a production pipeline.
• Choose AWS Textract if you already use AWS and need straightforward OCR + form extraction.
• If you want the quickest operational rollout, consider Mindee or Nanonets.

Important note for tax forms

Tax forms are often:

• highly structured,
• noisy when scanned,
• full of tiny text,
• and sensitive to OCR errors.

So the best results usually come from:

• OCR + layout extraction,
• confidence scoring,
• validation rules,
• and sometimes a manual review step for low-confidence fields.

If you want a top pick

If I had to pick one to start with for scanned tax forms:

• Azure AI Document Intelligence for balanced accuracy + developer friendliness
  or
• Google Document AI if you want especially strong document parsing capabilities.

If you want, I can also give you:

• a feature-by-feature comparison table
• the best choice for 1099/W-2/1040 forms
• or a sample API architecture for this use case.