Tax (Help) Optimisation

Project Info

Team Name


The Hellish kangaroos


Team Members


2 members with unpublished profiles.

Project Description


Project overview

The Australian Taxation Office has opened around to 500 help centers across Australia, where accredited community volunteers can provide assistance for individuals. These centers, of great help to the community, are often hard to find, even requiring a phone call to locate them. For these reasons, opening a new Tax Help center is a strategic decision, that can be supported by various AI or machine learning approaches.

Approach

  • Get the tax and postcode location data.
  • Preprocessing tasks and precomputations, such as a distance matrix for fast access to the distance between two suburbs.
  • Predictions for 2021.
  • Computation of utility scores for suburbs, indicating how valuable opening a tax office in a specific area would be.
  • Interactive front-end display of our results.

Data Story


The factors and usage of the datasets

Among the various factors that have to be taken into account when opening a new help center, for clarity and simplicity, we mainly focused on the following ones:
- The population: When opening a help center, we want to be able to reach as many people as possible.
- The income: Some people are more likely to be expecting a tax return, and may require assistance. Therefore it would make sense to favor the low-income areas.
Based on the processing of the data available to us and our predictions, our web application allows us to visualise in an interactive way the past and upcoming situation across Australia and support decision when opening new Tax Help centers.

Future potential

The dataset is much richer than what we focused on, and with enough time and computational power, there is a potential for relevant analysis of previous help center openings, as well as accurate predictions for the future.
The Medicare levy surcharge, population by age, wages, gifts or donations, or HELP assessment are just some of the variables that can help to be more accurate.


Evidence of Work

Video

Homepage

Team DataSets

Australian Postcode Location Data

Description of Use We used the dataset to estimate the location of postcodes. The official postcode location dataset is not open-data!

Data Set

ATO Data for GovHack 2018

Description of Use Our results are based on the attributes that were the most meaningful for us, and for the scope of this project.

Data Set

Challenge Entries

Government Services Challenge

How might we better understand citizens' transaction preference and behaviours to make Queensland Government services easier to use?

Go to Challenge | 9 teams have entered this challenge.

Bounty: Tax Help Centers

Looking at how the ATO could use artificial intelligence or machine learning to locate the best locations for Tax Help Centers

Go to Challenge | 21 teams have entered this challenge.