Ted London

  Tax agencies have a limited amount of resources to pursue tax compliance activities (collections and audit). Because of this resource limitation, they are required to build criteria to determine which individuals and businesses to select for audit and which collection cases to focus their efforts on. Typically, this selection is based on experience that info…

It may seem like a contradiction, but in some regards, tax offices are both data rich and data poor.  Tax offices have a significant amount of data, predominantly from business registration forms and tax return filings available to them.  This means that they have financial data, employment information, corporate data, and some demographic data.  Tax agencies often ha…

There have been numerous articles throughout the year about government organizations and universities lacking the staff and tools to review 100% of their transactions. Most of the issues with procure-to-pay compliance arise because many staff reviewing transactions are more focused on completing their review than on the quality of the review. This can result in improp…

U.S. Government Predictions 2019: Now that we have completed the 2018 election season, people are asking what is in store for 2019.  The good news is that revenues look strong, but there are a number of factors if you look deeper into the numbers.  Also, while often the first year of a legislative session occurs before our political leaders are thinking about re-elect…

I recently attended the Society for Collegiate Travel & Expense Management (SCTEM) 2018 Annual Conference.  The conference had over 200 professionals who were sharing new ideas and recent successes.  One of the benefits of working with universities is their emphasis on collaboration.  Sharing ideas and best practices is strongly ingrained in their philosophy. At…

Employee purchase cards (P-Cards) are work credit cards that are provided by most universities and state governments to many of their employees for smaller, routine purchases. These P-Cards can streamline the process of making purchases, saving the organization both time and money. P-Cards are much more cost effective than using the full procurement processes (solicit…

Expenses Abuse Gets Media and Tax Payers In A Froth Recent news articles out of Ohio ($4 beer dings Butler County Visitors Bureau in state audit) highlights the reputational risks that can impact an organization when it fails to monitor spending for non-compliance or expenses abuse.  The audit uncovered a single $4 Beer which was part of a payment for $11,554. While…

Are your analytics delivering results? The word “analytics” means different things to different people.  Depending on the analytical maturity of your organization, analytics could mean reports on your performance, analytics could mean predictive models, or it could mean fully optimized analytic decisions. No matter where you are on that spectrum, many organizations…

There are significant opportunities for government and higher ed institutions to reduce their procurement and travel expenses using predictive analytics. Historically, building analytical models had been a challenge due to the complexities of analyzing data across the entire procure-to-pay cycle.  Data are often disjoined across ERP, Procurement, Travel, and P-Card sy…

Social Network Analysis (SNA) tools hold the potential to help tax and revenue agencies identify non-compliance and tax fraud.  These tools have been proven to be effective in fraud detection¹, but to date haven’t been utilized to any large degree at tax agencies.  This blog describes what an SNA tool is, and how it can be utilized at a tax agency. Social Networking…