These days it’s hard to find a state budget that isn’t being severely impacted by the economy. Some states are being hit hard with huge deficits, holding up tax refunds and making deep cuts in spending as obvious sources of tax revenue dry up.
Others are turning to less obvious sources, such as revenue from tax scofflaws. These states are using advanced data warehousing technology to discover and recover millions in unrealized revenue. Seven states that use Teradata for tax matters are finding gold mines in unreported tax revenues. In the past few years, over half have recovered more than a billion dollars in under-reported and un-reported taxes – that’s billion with a “B.”
They’re recovering the revenue by developing and using their data warehouses. Government workers can drill and mine every pocket of the state’s tax data to find where taxes are owed but not yet paid. They can build powerful data mining programs that search within these data warehouses across data retrieved from multiple databases to sort out the tax evaders.
Scoring mechanisms allow the states to pursue those revenue sources that can most likely be recovered. It’s ensuring that those taxpayers that avoid taxes are identified and all citizens pay their fair share of the tax burden.
This is very important to states as layoffs and cutbacks in state government departments multiply – including state revenue organizations. If those laid-off workers were provided with the latest data-mining and warehousing tools and technology, they would not only be able to pay for their salaries but also could bring in additional revenues.
With our annual tax deadline upon us, I’m proud that Teradata can help state revenue agencies. Sure, nobody really likes taxes, but we sure do like for our local governments to work well and provide the public services we all need and want. And I do like to know that while I am paying my taxes, everyone else is too. Using technology to help make sure we all share equally in paying for those services makes sense.
Darryl McDonald
CMO, Teradata
