Artificial Intelligence Of The Treasury That Persecutes The Self-Employed With False Invoices

The Tax Agency has wanted to revitalize its fight against tax fraud during 2021. One of the legs of that war is the issuance of false invoices, an illegal practice against which they have faced a new ally: artificial intelligence.

In the report on the presentation of results of prevention and control of tax and customs fraud of the Tax Agency, false invoices are established as one of the “objectives” of the body in its action to fight fraud , which is why it has designed a search program for those invoices with the support of artificial intelligence.

Throughout 2020, a project was launched that in 2021 has been perfected. The system studies, collects and analyzes violations due to false invoices belonging to previous years in order to develop patterns of behavior that can be repeated in the present and thus help to detect this practice. In the first year, the system studied the cases of 2018 and in 2021 it has studied those of 2019, which makes this tool a live detection method.

With this information, the artificial intelligence of the Treasury designs suspicious profiles. In the words of the agency, “it has been proven that companies (or freelancers) that commit this type of fraud are grouped into a series of profiles with some common characteristics , so it is possible to generate models with a high accuracy capacity”.

Thus, when the system encounters a case that presents similarities with one of those studied from previous years, it predicts the probability of fraud and, if necessary, it can urge the Treasury to initiate the pertinent investigations.

According to the Treasury, the objectives of the implantation of this artificial intelligence are to focus the investigations on the companies with the most suspicious profiles and to fight against unfair competition caused by the irregular billing of these companies or freelancers compared to the rest.

The final objective of making false invoices is the pretense of operations that have not caused an exchange for products or goods that have not really been produced . This is done to simulate expenses that reduce the VAT to be paid and even obtain undue refunds, as well as to simulate results accounts better than in reality to obtain bank financing or artificially justify subsidies.