The Australian Taxation Office: Creating Value with Advanced Analytics

The Australian Tax Office (ATO) was a large government department in Australia that in 2015 established a dedicated program called Smarter Data to cultivate advanced data analytics capabilities. This vignette describes how the ATO created an AI solution that nudged taxpayers toward productive tax claim behaviors in real-time. The ATO intended for the solution to improve Australia’s complex tax lodgment (i.e., filing) process by making the process easier for taxpayers to accurately lodge and for auditors to equitably oversee. In 2018, the nudging resulted in $113 million in changed claim amounts. This vignette is second in a series of stories that illustrate value creation using AI.