General Financial Directorate: How to automate data cleaning?

The General Financial Directorate (GFD) is a government body responsible for administering state taxes (including personal income tax, corporation tax, value added tax, road tax, immovable property tax, tax on the acquisition of immovable property, stamp duty land tax, inheritance tax, and gift tax). Consequently, the GFD handles a huge amount of taxpayer data.

GFD staff often had to solve the problems associated with a large number of taxpayers (approximately 10 million residents, nearly 500 thousand foreigners, more than 450 thousand businesses, and almost one million self-employed individuals) and a correspondingly vast amount of data.

One of these issues was the unequivocal identification of natural and legal persons together with the clear and correct assignment of individual taxes to the tax subject. The processed data needed to be updated regularly, and as quickly and automatically as possible.

The GFD manages and processes massive volumes of data with a value of tens to hundreds of millions of Czech crowns.

The ADQC installation took place in a matter of days.

The GFD chose a tool from the Ataccama Data Platform as the one best suited to its requirements. The Ataccama Data Quality Center (ADQC) was thus implemented to fulfill the following functions:

• Consolidating taxpayer records from external sources for the purposes of further analysis
• Identifying and immediately rectifying duplicates
• Automatically completing and consolidating address details
• Other tasks

The data is processed in batches, allowing the combined use of ADQC and other ETL resources.

The goal of actualizing the highest-quality database for the GFD’s analytical operations is thus achieved. Furthermore, the adjustable input and output formats in ADQC make it very easy to use.

The installation of the ADQC tool at the General Financial Directorate was accomplished in a matter of days. The implementation team also included employees from the Financial Directorate, who now manage and adjust everything themselves. During the implementation, the local, Czech-speaking development and support team was much appreciated.

Aside from those already in use, the ADQC tool also offers a number of additional features that the General Financial Directorate will utilize in the future.

These will be deployed gradually in the next stages of the project, taking into account current possibilities and needs.