Case Study: Revenue (Irish Tax and Customs) achieves improved fraud detection and reduced error with SAS analytics

Irish Tax and Customs tax officer describes how data mining fits in

Irish Tax and Customs (Revenue) faced growing pressure to do more with less and needed an affordable way to predict and prevent fraud across a large population of taxpayers. Traditional business rules and intelligence were helpful but insufficient for detecting complex patterns and prioritizing scarce enforcement resources.

Revenue implemented SAS® Fraud and Improper Payments alongside existing methods, using predictive, unsupervised and semi‑supervised analytics—segmentation, outlier and network analysis—and deployed models in live systems with iterative feedback. This combination improved fraud detection and case prioritization, reduced false positives, and cut fraud-related costs for Irish taxpayers.

Revenue Irish Tax and Customs

Duncan Cleary

Senior Statistician