Title
Gated Mixture Variational Autoencoders for Value Added Tax audit case selection
Abstract
In this work, we address the problem of targeted Value Added Tax (VAT) audit case selection by means of machine learning. This is a challenging problem that has remained rather elusive for EU-based Tax Departments, due to the inadequate quantity of tax audits that can be used for conventional supervised model training. To this end, we devise a novel Gated Mixture Variational Autoencoder deep network, that can be effectively trained with data from a limited number of audited taxpayers, combined with a large corpus of filed VAT returns. This gives rise to a semi-supervised learning framework that leverages the latest advances in deep learning and robust regularization using variational inference. We developed our approach in collaboration with the Cyprus Tax Department and experimentally deployed it to facilitate its audit selection process; to this end, we used actual VAT data from Cyprus-based taxpayers. This way, we obtained strong empirical evidence that our approach can greatly facilitate the VAT audit case selection process. Specifically, we obtained up to 76% out-of-sample accuracy in detecting whether a significant tax yield will be generated from a specific prospective VAT audit.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1016/j.knosys.2019.105048
Knowledge-Based Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Value Added Tax,Audit selection,Variational autoencoder,Finite mixture model
Data mining,Audit,Autoencoder,Empirical evidence,Inference,Computer science,Regularization (mathematics),Artificial intelligence,Deep learning,Value-added tax,Machine learning
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
188
0950-7051
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christos Kleanthous100.34
Sotirios P. Chatzis2305.94