SAS^® for Government Tax Audits

Use audit resources productively by more effectively identifying and prioritizing tax returns for audit

At all levels of government, tax agencies are understaffed and can only examine a small percentage of potentially problematic tax returns. You hope to select the most important and potentially productive cases to review, but traditional rules-based methods produce many false negatives and false positives. It can be difficult or impossible to know how to prioritize the cases targeted for review.

SAS^® for Government Tax Audits applies a combination of powerful analytic techniques to the issue. Without requiring audit teams to become statistical gurus, the SAS solution accurately identifies tax returns for audit and ranks them by the likelihood of under-reporting, magnitude of the revenue to be collected and expected cost per audit.

With this combination of insights, auditors can focus their attention on the cases most likely to produce the best results. SAS analytics with scoring can improve audit success by as much as 20 to 50 percent.

Components of SAS^® for Government Tax Audits

• An audit risk replacement (ARR) score identifies and ranks tax under-filers based on attributes similar to other under-filers who have been successfully audited in the past.
• An audit risk augmentation (ARA) score identifies and ranks the potential risk in unusual tax returns, such as returns where fields were out of normal range or internally inconsistent.
• An audit magnitude (AM) score identifies anomalous behavior and ranks the returns by the magnitude of the potential underpayment.

How is SAS^® different?

Only SAS:

• Delivers analytically derived scores that pinpoint and prioritize exactly where audit efforts will be most productive.
• Combines three distinct analytic models and learning styles to assign scores to selected returns, based on past trends, present anomalies and the potential magnitude of collections.
• Develops and maintains all elements of the solution, so customers do not have to worry about the integration issues common with proprietary niche solutions.
• Is built on the SAS Business Analytics Framework and integrates with other SAS solutions, including SAS for Government Tax Collections.