Analytics And Automation Go A Long Way To Help Narrow Down Tax Non-Compliance Investigations

In an interaction with Dataquest, Sudipta Ghosh, Analytics Leader at PwC India talks about how the Andhra Pradesh Commercial Taxes Department is benefiting from PwC’s advance analytics solutions to mitigate tax non-compliance and how automation plays a major role in it. Excerpts:

- Sarabjeet Kaur

How can tax non-compliance be prevented with the help of analytics tools? Does automation play an important role?

Analytics is all about mining data and generating meaningful insights to assist in decision making and administration. Tax intelligence solutions help to unearth various kinds of outliers and exceptions by analyzing a huge amount of data from various sources using advanced analytical and indirect taxation related business rules. Automation plays an important role in reducing the time taken for collecting and analyzing the data, identifying red flagged transactions and conducting audits. It helps to save a significant amount of time and resources on the part of the tax department.

For example, our advanced analytics solution has the potential to scan more than 100 million records of all dealers’ data such as invoices, returns, waybills and transit passes to identify and categorize possible non-compliant dealers based on several metrics and analytical models. This level of automation goes a long way in helping the tax department to narrow down the investigation set and increase the effectiveness of the audits.