This week, we’re on the show floor at Crowdopolis and I will be presenting to a great crowd (pun intended) on the topic of, “Crowdsourcing in Action: Secure Big Data Capture and Cleansing.” With tax season in full swing – and the thought of filing taxes on the minds of many – I hope there will be many captive ears in the audience as I explain how Lionbridge Enterprise Crowdsourcing’s Data Management Solutions for tax processing allow state governments’ departments of revenue to collect, cleanse and process vital tax data.
I’ll share with you some key highlights from my presentation. To begin, let’s take a look at some numbers. According to the U.S. Department of Treasury, the IRS collects $2.4 trillion each tax year from an estimated 234 million tax returns. Approximately 15 percent or 35 million are paper returns. According to the IRS, the estimated annual tax gap is $385 billion dollars which comes from non-filing, under reporting and under payment.
So the question becomes, how can big data help close the tax gap?
If the data submitted on all tax returns and W2s was available in an electronic format, state governments could perform big data analytics to identify and prevent fraud resulting in billions of dollars in tax revenue. However, with more than 35 million paper tax returns being filed every year, that is not the case. Historically, capturing and cleansing data from a W2 was cost prohibitive and could only be accomplished with costly manual labor models or by utilizing recognition technology that could only provide a partial data set.
This is where Lionbridge Enterprise Crowdsourcing steps in. With Lionbridge ECS’ solutions, state governments can convert paper returns and unstructured data into electronic forms—including all data within tax returns and W2s—and then perform their own analysis on those 35 million paper tax returns being filed every year. The capture of structured and unstructured data from returns and W2s through enterprise crowdsourcing can help agencies close this massive tax gap. Lionbridge empowers departments to leverage big data analytics that can identify and prevent fraud and result in billions of dollars in tax revenue.
Securing data is critical when dealing with personal tax information and Lionbridge ECS has a unique, technology-enabled solution that provides unparalleled security, breaking the form fields into unrelated, non-contextual snippets prior to leaving the protection of client’s facility. Then a team of pre-qualified data conversion specialists work around the clock to capture and confirm the data. Once the data is captured and confirmed, the snippets are then reassembled behind the security of the client’s firewall. Sensitive documents never leave the premises in context, ensuring that the sensitive tax data is fully secure.
Want to learn more? Check out our Data Management Solutions to see how Lionbridge Enterprise Crowdsourcing can improve tax processing.