Agencia Tributaria

Fighting Tax Fraud
Within Agencia Estatal de Administración Tributaria (AEAT), the Spanish national tax office’s IT function, a division has responsibility for designing, building, acquiring and maintaining systems and tools that facilitate the analysis of tax data. A key objective among many of its goals is the identification and prevention of possible tax fraud.

The effort that La Agencia Tributaria undertakes against fraud is strategic not only for the state tax office, but also for the entire Spanish nation. To effectively manage this large-scale initiative, the AEAT handles enormous volumes of data on a daily basis, to which hundreds of users have access.

Previously, AEAT managed all its information using a solution developed internally. These early systems fit the needs of the tax office perfectly, but needed to be expanded to accommodate data growth and usage. The Agencia Tributaria was looking for a standard system capable of managing and storing huge volumes of data and dealing with large quantities of complex inquiries with rapid response times.

The tax office had a particular requirement that the new solution needed to address: it would have to tackle a challenge inherent in the existing information infrastructure - specifically the processing, management and analysis of complex volumes of detailed information consolidated in data tables containing over one hundred thousand columns.

Innovative Upgrade
Given these stringent requirements, AEAT elected to implement Sybase IQ, a business intelligent data warehousing and mining tool specifically designed for organizations needing to analyze large volumes of data. Sybase IQ fulfilled all the demanding requirements of the Spanish tax office and provided a key additional benefit. The new solution was the most innovative and comprehensive available in the market that allows data to be stored, processed and accessed in columns, rather than by rows as in traditional relational database architectures.  This architecture translates into efficient processing, faster query responses, and dramatic storage compression rates.

AEAT also selected IBM System p hardware for its solution, running SUSE Linux – a highly complementary system, leveraging the strength of analytics, a robust IBM platform, and cost-effective operating system.

Strengthened Information Management System
The Agencia Tributaria has hundreds of users accessing extremely sensitive information originating from two primary sources.  Normal tax collection and employment operations contribute an ongoing stream of data as a part of daily tax activities.  The second source emanates from the activities of investigative groups as they summon data from third parties in the pursuit of tax investigations.

From the perspective of AEAT, Sybase IQ has the capability to access the information, conduct analysis and provide answers to all types of inquiries, including unplanned queries, in real-time. This has enabled response times to be significantly reduced and has expanded the output of the organization.

Following the deployment of the new system, the Spanish tax office improved its information management and, at the same time, increased data storage capacity, significantly reduced costs and made an important contribution to eco-efficiency.

At present, AEAT’s database holds 14 terabytes of data, which equates to almost 2 billion records. And, as the population grows and the tax office generates new legislation, these events create new demands for information. AEAT predicts that in the next few years its database will grow to around 25 terabytes representing around 13,000 million records.

With Sybase IQ, The Agencia Tributaria has succeeded in managing the constant growth in the volume of information and implemented a dynamic means of responding to queries. Using technology readily available in the market, AEAT has been able to focus the organization’s resources on deploying the analytical tools to improve tax processing and fraud investigations – without incurring the costs associated with maintaining and developing its own database management and analytics systems.

With the Sybase IQ and IBM System p solution, the Spanish tax office has strengthened its information management system and equipped itself with the weaponry necessary to continue the fight against tax fraud and uphold the force of the law.