Ireland Office of the Revenue Commissioners: Knowledge Discovery Tool

The goal of the Ireland Office of the Revenue Commissioners is to serve the community by fairly and efficiently collecting all taxes and duties levied by the Republic of Ireland. It is among the most progressive tax administrations worldwide, having started to implement an integrated approach to taxation services a decade ago, with data warehousing introduced in the mid-1990s. Its latest development has been to provide online services that enable customers to use the Internet to electronically file returns make payments and perform enquiries on their tax position.

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The Ireland Office of the Revenue Commissioners is always on the lookout for new ways of deriving value from its data warehouse and data marts. During a visit to Accenture Technology Labs, IT executives from the Ireland Office of the Revenue Commissioners saw the potential of the Accenture Knowledge Discovery Tool, which provides an innovative way to link the full range of data the Ireland Office of the Revenue Commissioners has available when reviewing a case. The prototype demonstrated a knowledge integration application that goes beyond basic search engines by probing multiple data repositories and enabling users to see relationships between pieces of information that they never knew existed.

Accenture and the Ireland Office of the Revenue Commissioners together developed and implemented a proof of concept based on the Knowledge Discovery Tool. The team complemented the innovative user interface with security, data access, data aggregation and transformation rules as well as various tax compliance and risk profiles.

In addition to trawling the Ireland Office of the Revenue Commissioners’ data warehouse, provisions for Internet searches were also built-in. In this way, information such as directorships, company relationships, tax agent performance, credit history, payment and compliance patterns as well as background and external information are linked together.

Following the success of the proof of concept, a full production system branded by the Ireland Office of the Revenue Commissioners as "Profiler" was put in place. The Profiler application significantly improves the quality and speed of audit research. It assists the Ireland Office of the Revenue Commissioners in better understanding cases (taxpayers) under investigation. And it is of particular interest to the auditors from the Ireland Office of the Revenue Commissioners—debt collection officials wishing to enhance their understanding of a case where revenue is at risk—as well as to officials dealing with larger and more complex taxpayers.

Accenture has separately packaged the original proof of concept to create a rapidly customizable template for a knowledge integrated application known as "Case Crawler."

The Case Crawler template allows a user to browse the full range of information available. It is a cross-platform, cross-operating system template that is easily extended to new internal or external information sources, and can connect to an organization's enterprise application integration technology. New features, such as alerts and triggers, can easily be incorporated and the technology would enhance any kind of investigative or research-type work. Potential government application areas include police, immigration, defense, welfare and education.

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