What's the IRS Doing with Data Mining?

by Curt Hall

I spent several days last week attending the OracleWorld Conference in San Francisco, California, USA. One particularly interesting session I sat in on focused on how the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is applying data mining to automate tax returns analysis. I think the IRS's use of data mining for analyzing tax returns provides an interesting and informative example of the issues associated with applying data mining to complex business problems.