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Block
1 Smart Services in the Tax Domain
09.30h
– 10.15h Right from the start. (Kors Kool)
The
Dutch Tax and Customs have developed a new strategy aimed at preventing non-compliance
by moving upfront and doing it ‘right from the start’. This approach that is
also known as ‘horizontal monitoring’ is based on strengthening cooperation
between the tax administration, taxpayers and intermediaries. Embedded
compliance and working based upon a trust framework are amongst the
strategically chosen measurements.
Kors
Kool is the responsible manager for the development and
implementation of this new way of working. He is also co-chair of an
international cooperation group on tax compliance.
10.15h
– 11.00h A model-driven approach to intelligent client handling support (Jeroen
van Grondelle)
In
this presentation we share experiences in capturing tax legislation and
policy declaratively into models and show some of the intelligent services
that can be offered based on these models using AI techniques. The end user
experience of such model driven user interfaces has been a challenge: we
present an approach for declaratively influencing the user experience. User
Interaction designers can create engaging end user dialogs, independent of
the contextual content of the dialog, derived from domain models. Jeroen van Grondelle is cofounder of Be
Informed and one of the creators of its business process platform. Currently,
he is principal architect at Be Informed, responsible for innovation and
research. Because of its groundbreaking approach to business processes, it is
crucial for Be Informed to cooperate closely with the academic world. Van
Grondelle develops relations with universities, research institutes and other
innovative enterprises. Through research projects, joint publications and
case studies by visiting researchers, he is able to present researchers with
real world challenges, experiences and is able to adopt the newest research developments
early. Van Grondelle regularly speaks at conferences and seminars. He
recently published a number of papers that dealt with enabling business
experts to use formal representations in capturing their knowledge. He has a
masters degree in mathematics from Utrecht University, specializing in
algorithm design and large-scale parallel computing.
Block
2 Innovations in Tax Assessment
11.30h
– 12.15h Innovation in the Hungarian Tax Administration (Iván Futó)
The Hungarian Tax and Financial Control Administration
(APEH) was the most innovative institution of the public administration at
the beginning of the 2000’s. The electronic taxation was the first electronic
service of the Hungarian government and the Office was at the same time the
Certification Authority (CA), the Registration Authority (RA), the
application, signature and time stamp provider, as well.
Despite the fact that already in 2001 the
use of knowledge based (expert) systems was part of the IT strategy no such
systems were implemented in the following years.
This presentation deals with the difficulties
of introducing knowledge-based applications in a Tax Office or in the Public
Administration in general. We will try to explain why it is so, based on the
presenter‘s experience with the Hungarian Tax and Customs Administration,
where he was the IT vice-president for six years.
It is also interesting to see how in a
country with a good former AI tradition, the situation changed in the past
10-15 years regarding the acceptance of knowledge-based systems.
Paradoxically in a situation where basic
laws change year by year, or even twice a year, and new tax laws are
introduced frequently to raise the incomes of the budget by the end of the
year, the resistance against knowledge-based applications that facilitate the
implementation of such regulations is so strong.
Some of the potential obstacles discussed
are: aversion to unknown technology, nobody wants to be the first, missing
authentic ”champions”, the problem of selecting a good pilot application,
difficulties in integrating the application into the legacy system, the low
level of MP’s IT support.
12.15h
– 13.00h A Frame-based solution for Tax Administrations (Coos van der Togt)
Tax Administrations needs to shorten
their time to implement changes in tax laws. Local Governmental Administrations
seek cooperation in executing local tax laws. Civilians and companies expects
services based on their specific situation.
Lower budgets forces administrations to
reduce costs. Large projects often fail to meet the expectations. Delays and
higher expenses are more common than exception. Of the shelf solutions based
on best-practices avoids large development projects.
A frame-based solution for Tax
Administration gives the answer. Coos van der Togt presents the business
approach based on more than 20 years of Tax Administration experience (Dutch
Tax Office, Dutch Caribean tax implementation). Understanding the tax
business is the necessary for successful create frame-based tax solution in which
rules, processes and data are separated for changes and coupled for
execution.
Coos shows us his approach which resulted
in a generic tax solution based on the Be Informed business platform.
13.00h
– 14.00h Lunch
Block
3 Intelligent Monitoring and Risk Assessment
14.00h
– 14.45h Monitoring the Internet (Eric Hertogh)
The Internet
Service Centre of the Dutch tax administration collects internet data for
different purposes and processes, such as processes that deal with services,
supervision, investigation and webcare. Different systems and processes are
activated to collect this data. Collecting and refining such data comes with not
only technical challenges, but also legal and social ones. Eric explains in
his presentation how these issues are handled in practise. Eric will
introduce various tools that have been developed for monitoring the Internet,
including Xenon (by the Dutch Tax administration developed and in use in many
European and non-European countries), QWMS (type of sample analysis), Coosto
(social media analysis), European News Monitor (news monitor) and the
identification analysis of websites.
Eric Hertogh is
head of the Internet Service Centre of the Dutch tax authorities. Eric
started as a clerk at a local department 27 years ago and later became tax
auditor. Eric became project advisor for the Xenon project, an Internet
Monitoring system which development started at the mid nineties of the 20th
century. The current Xenon tool however has not yet landed in the primary
process. Therefore Eric founded the Internet Service Centre. Starting with
three people, this center has now grown to 25 people. These people often give
training session for both national as well as international Tax agencies.
Amonst Eric’s roles are stimulating cooperation between tax authorities.
14.45h
– 15.15h Coffee break
15.15h
– 16.00h Scenario building and Agent-based diagnosis (Giovanni Sileno &
Alexander Boer)
In the Agile project, a cooperation
between The Leibniz Center for Law, TU Delft, the Dutch tax administration,
and the immigration service, we developed a knowledge acquisition methodology
for legal knowledge in service-oriented architecture, developed to address
the agility of public administration in responding to change of the law, and
processes of change in society that affect its implementation and
interpretation of the law. An important result is to make the case law, and
legal expert knowledge of critical legal incidents in organizations, two
diagnostic knowledge sources underutilized in modern management and business
process engineering, more accessible as a resource for design of social
structures and intelligent systems.
Part of the methodology is a conceptual framework for abstract cases of
conforming and non-conforming scenarios, collected for animation in an
agent-based platform for design purposes, or used as reference base for
model-based diagnosis tool. To reduce complexity of the system and its
environment, we do not focus on autonomous, arbitrarily complex
“intelligence” of involved agents, but instead concentrate attention on
story-based descriptions and on institutional agent role abstractions as
addressed by court cases and domain experts, that capture the beliefs and
intentions ascribed to these story-based or institutional agent roles. The framework
has been tested with a number of real estate tax fraud scenarios, supplied by
Bernd Veldman.
16.00h
– 16.45h Information-based diagnosis of non-compliance (Bernd Veldman)
The
Dutch Tax Office has a thematic approach on real estate. Starting point for
the Dutch tax administration is the wish to create the best possible support
to the taxpayer resulting in correct fiscal statements. In order to
shift the focus to supporting taxpayers rather than assessing every
individual one, a more efficient risks-oriented strategy is needed. The tax
office works in a way where the costs of auditing are agreeable low and were
it becomes possible to accept certain risks that come with real estate
transactions.
We combine a
micro-theory (top down) based risk analysis with (bottom up) data mining approach,
which enables us amongst others to determine the total tax gap in real estate
transactions in the Dutch pension fund branche, the social housing
corporation branche en transactions between connected people. In this
presentation we’ll present a micro-theory based audit approach where we audited
a representative set of selected transactions to validate certain hypothesis
in expected real estate transactions risks. This combination is called
micro-theory based information driven auditing.
Theory
driven data mining also plays a role when developing new fiscal laws. The
most recent fiscal law on the taxation of real estate for example includes
services for possessors of more than 10 pieces of real estate, who will have
their tax returns partly pre filled in in advance.
Also the
choice for the definition of the tax-object and its features has been
influenced by existing data collections (information driven tax laws). This
makes it possible lower the administrative burden for the taxpayer as well as
the cost of auditing for the tax administration.
drs.
B.L.A.M. Veldman RA is a forensic accountant and working at the Dutch
competence center of real estate. At this moment he is working on a PhD at
the University of Amsterdam. His subject is the development of a scientific
approach for the creation of knowledge concerning risk-indicators in real
estate transactions. In this field it is very important tot work with valid
indicators that measure the correct items.
Block
4 Challenges and Future Developments
16.45h
– 17.15h An
innovative generic approach to intelligent client handling (Robert van
Doesburg)
The Dutch
Immigration Service recently implemented implemented a rule based Information
system for client handling. This system creates a treatment plan for every
individual client based on personal en case related information.
The knowledge base
needed for this operation is based on the law. The Dutch Immigration Service
is developing a generic approach for modelling law based client handling in
co-operation with the Dutch Tax Administration.
Robert van Doesburg
is working on this project and is a project manager for the Direction
Information Systems of the Information Service. He will present a framework for
intelligent client handling and its consequences for public organisations.
17.15h
– 18.30h Drinks
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