Tax man employs 'DataDetective' to track online traders

Companies and individuals that trade on Ebay, and the Internet in general are facing the prospect of having their transactions flagged up to the Inland Revenue automatically by XENON, a Super Computer that can sift and sort through thousands of websites, studiously searching for ecommerce transactions and online trading activity, before reporting back to the Government.

The brain of this computer is called the “DataDetective”, the brainchild of 38 year old Dutchman Rob van de Veer. De Veer is a software and artificial intelligence specialist and he is chief executive of Dutch data mining company Sentinent.

Xenon will enable Tax Inspectors to collect much of the information that they will need to seal a successful prosecution. Deny the transactions when questioned and there could be red faces all round as the DataDetective has rounded up all the evidence before the questioning even begins.

DataDectective works day and night searching for patterns on the Internet. It looks for pages in particular that give the customer the option to buy online.

This data is then fed back into XENON, so that it can begin cross referencing its findings against Government taxation records for that particular business. The computer can then check whether or not the tax has been paid.

Xenon was developed for the Dutch Revenue Service, but has been exported to other authorities… including the UK.

John Marks, whose company publishes ‘Insider Secrets of a Tax Investigator’ said “It is common knowledge that the Revenue are turning to the Internet to focus on Ebay sellers and web store owners who perhaps are not paying all the tax they owe. It is so much more cost effective for the Revenue to do it this way, and the volume of investigations is increasing daily.”

"A tax investigation is very disruptive to a business and with the number of investigations on the increase we’ve developed our audio CD guide, ‘Insider Secrets of a Tax Investigator’ specifically to help small businesses and the self-employed to minimize the likelihood of an HMRC tax investigation.”