Telepathy and mind reading: the tax office’s new superpowers

By: Trademagazin Date: 2025. 02. 20. 10:39

“The tax office nowadays knows who is worth checking in a way that borders on magic and puts mentalists to shame, and it is increasingly sure-handed in selecting those taxpayers where the investigation makes sense and will actually find some kind of error, discrepancy, or, God forbid, fraud.” – warned Judit Jancsa-Pék, senior consultant at LeitnerLeitner. The ever-improving hit rate is actually made possible by digitalization and the data we provide, on which targeted selection systems and individual risk analysis procedures are built. This year, the authority wants to clean up the data by introducing new procedures and expanding the procedures already in use, so that it can target even more precisely.

The data compiled by companies or transmitted in real time: online invoice and cash register, online data services for transportation, reports related to private individuals, corporate tax returns, transfer pricing data services, are being assembled into an unimaginably large digital data asset in the hands of the tax authority, which is now analyzed with the help of artificial intelligence, and thus contradictions can be easily detected.

This year, the authority’s mission is data cleaning, so that the incoming data is as accurate and reliable as possible. This will make official tax audits even more efficient, and based on this, they can build behavioral prediction models that analyze taxpayers’ life paths. To this end, a new method has been introduced, the data reconciliation procedure. In the first round, it will be used to clean VAT and social security information, e.g. if a business and its business partner provide different data in the online invoice and cash register systems, or if private individuals fail to report to their employers. The taxpayer called for data reconciliation must clarify the discrepancies within 15 days, otherwise they may be fined 300 thousand forints.

Taxpayers will be selected for data reconciliation with the help of artificial intelligence software, so the inspection will take place without human intervention or with minimal human interaction, and soon the imposition of fines for non-compliance will also become automatic. And although this is easy money, the primary interest of the authorities is not to pile up fines, but to clean up data, which will provide them with additional ammunition to detect really big frauds.