Improving Tax Collection Using XML and Object-Oriented Technologies

Posted by William B. Trautman* 

The recent financial crisis has led not only to significant public budget deficits in the United States and around the world, but also to a heated debate over what to do about them. Some argue for increased government spending to fund stimulus programs while others argue for reduced spending. Little attention has been paid, however, to increasing the collection of tax that is already owed. While tax administration information technology projects have a long and spotty track record, the advent of electronic filing in XML format and related technologies has significant potential for improving the collection of tax revenue, particularly with respect to complex business enterprises and high-wealth individuals.

This post will discuss an XML-based technology that the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has tested on the largest U.S. corporate taxpayers over a recent 18-month period. The technology has yielded cost savings in terms of more streamlined audit planning and has identified significant corporate tax revenue that otherwise would have gone undetected. The technology is essentially a data management and analysis system that allows one to construct virtual economic enterprises with a degree of detail constrained only by the available data and estimate the tax compliance risk of those enterprises in real time.