Simulating tax evasion using agent based modelling And evolutionary search

Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2014.

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Badar, Osama
Other Authors: Una-May O'Reilly and Erik Hemberg.
Format: Thesis
Language:eng
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2014
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/91452
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author Badar, Osama
author2 Una-May O'Reilly and Erik Hemberg.
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Badar, Osama
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description Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2014.
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spelling mit-1721.1/914522019-04-11T08:12:15Z Simulating tax evasion using agent based modelling And evolutionary search Badar, Osama Una-May O'Reilly and Erik Hemberg. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2014. 7 Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (page 61). We present a design and model for Simulating Co-Evolution of Tax and Evasion (SCOTE). The system performs agent based modeling of the tax ecosystem and searches for tax evasion strategies using a variant of a Genetic Algorithm with a grammar. Current methodologies and tools to detect, discover or recognize tax evasion are not sufficient. In recent years the tax gap, the aggregate sum of the difference between the tax owed in principle and tax paid in practice was calculated to exceed 450 billion dollars. Numerous tax evasion schemes have surfaced that perform seemingly legal transactions but once observed closely their sole purpose is to reduce tax liability. Moreover, these schemes are evolving with time. Whenever a scheme is detected and eliminated by fixing a loop hole in the tax code, others emerge to replace it and currently there is no systematic way to predict the emergence of these schemes. SCOTE allows us to encode tax evasion strategies into a searchable representation. SCOTE has three major components namely the Genetic Algorithm library(GA), the interpreter and the Parser. The GA encodes transaction plans into an integer representation and performs search over the transaction plans to find a scheme that produces the maximum tax gap. The Parser performs grammatical mapping of list of integers to a transaction plan.The interpreter models the tax ecosystem into a graph where the entities such as taxpayer and partnerships are nodes and the transactions between entities are the edges. Each entity has a portfolio of assets and the values of the assets are updated after a transaction. The interpreter runs a transaction plan generated by GA on the graph to produce the tax gap. We ran two experiments using two of the known tax evasion schemes namely "Son of Boss" and "iBOB" and we were able to detect the two schemes using SCOTE. by Osama Badar. M. Eng. 2014-11-04T21:37:43Z 2014-11-04T21:37:43Z 2014 2014 Thesis http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/91452 893858632 eng M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582 61 pages application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology
spellingShingle Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Badar, Osama
Simulating tax evasion using agent based modelling And evolutionary search
title Simulating tax evasion using agent based modelling And evolutionary search
title_full Simulating tax evasion using agent based modelling And evolutionary search
title_fullStr Simulating tax evasion using agent based modelling And evolutionary search
title_full_unstemmed Simulating tax evasion using agent based modelling And evolutionary search
title_short Simulating tax evasion using agent based modelling And evolutionary search
title_sort simulating tax evasion using agent based modelling and evolutionary search
topic Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
url http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/91452
work_keys_str_mv AT badarosama simulatingtaxevasionusingagentbasedmodellingandevolutionarysearch