Closing the gap: automated screening of tax returns to identify egregious tax shelters

  • Authors:
  • Dave DeBarr;Zach Eyler-Walker

  • Affiliations:
  • The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA;The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

According to the most recent strategic plan for the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), high-income individuals are a primary contributor to the "tax gap," the difference between the amount of tax that should be collected and the amount of tax that actually is collected [1]. This case study addresses the use of machine learning and statistical analysis for the purpose of helping the IRS target high-income individuals engaging in abusive tax shelters. Kernel-based analysis of known abuse allows targeting individual taxpayers, while associative analysis allows targeting groups of taxpayers who appear to be participating in a tax shelter being promoted by a common financial advisor. Unlike many KDD applications that focus on classification or density estimation, this analysis task requires estimating risk, a weighted combination of both the likelihood of abuse and the potential revenue losses.