When federal authorities want to ferret out abusive tax shelters, they send an army of forensic accountants, auditors and lawyers to burrow into suspicious tax returns.
Analyzing mountains of filings and tracing money flows through far-flung subsidiaries is notoriously difficult; even if the Internal Revenue Servicemanages to unravel a major scheme, it typically does so only years after its emergence, by which point a fresh dodge has often already replaced it.
But what if that needle-in-a-haystack quest could be done routinely, and quickly, by a computer? Could the federal tax laws — 74,608 pages of legal gray areas and welters of credits, deductions and exemptions — be accurately rendered in an algorithm?
New academic research seeks to use artificial intelligence to combat tax evasion by corporate entities, from publicly traded multinationals to private partnerships. The goal is to give the I.R.S. a better way to investigate sophisticated tax shelters that strip tens of billions of dollars from federal coffers each year.
Continue reading Computer Scientists Wield Artificial Intelligence to Battle Tax Evasion
