Five ways to identify tax cheats with analytics

What tax evasion schemes are prevalent around the world, and how can they be detected and prevented?

Traditionally, governments depend on information reporting to verify that a taxpayer is telling the truth on his tax returns, for example. However, a lack of reporting can lead to billions of dollars’ worth of income being misreported.

Tax officials now have new tools at their disposal. Analytics techniques, ranging from simple to sophisticated, can help them to seek out identity thieves, shell networks and underground economies.

A whitepaper by business analytics provider SAS outlines five techniques that can help agencies to identify individuals and companies committing fraud:

• Business rules: To identify known inconsistencies and disconnects
• Predictive modeling: To detect patterns associated with known fraud
• Anomaly detection: To find unusual attributes or transactions
• Database matching: To identify potential cases from non-tax information
• Link analysis: To connect the dots among related entities

To learn more about how SAS’ analytics tools can help your agency to reduce tax crime, download the whitepaper by filling out the form below.