Tax Allocation-System Creation Allowing Hyperlocal Government Investment Into Targeted Sustainable Developmental Solutions

Local Chapter Kharagpur, India Chapter

Coordinated byIndia ,

Santanu Banerjee

Status: Completed

Project Duration: 25 Oct 2022 - 14 Feb 2023

Open Source resources available from this project

Github Repository

Project background.

The existing Tax infrastructures all across the globe are managed by the central government who collect Taxes and use them for purposes whose priorities are decided often by government officials and in board rooms of private companies. This project identifies the possibility of providing a new soft power to the public taxpayers to allow them to direct their own Tax Money into solving their own problems.

The problem.

Local problems accumulate over time causing pressure on the government. This mainly happens due to lack of management and funds. Further there may be existing platforms which collect public grievances but they are often not worked upon or the development comes about too late. This chronic problem persists in many developing countries as well as in India and may be identified as the diverging gap between the government and the public. We try to address this problem by allowing the government to create a Decision Support System. This DSS would be incorporated within the TAX portals and would work on the taxpayer willing to provide additional information on what problems he/she is facing. From among these, the taxpayers is able to choose a few for investing his one-time yearly tax for the government to work upon the solution to that problem. The decision for fund allocation is also already tagged and it is the decision of the government whether to comply to it or divert it somewhere else (i.e. we are not rooting for a chaotic power transfer but a soft power which whose data of previous years would later be accessible to policy makers and local administration).

Project goals.

1)   Motivate the project developers and make aware about why this is important, brainstorm on the necessary skill requirements and develop a deadline 2)   Understand the similarities and differences between Tax Systems of different countries and the data collected in their portals 3)   Develop an Open-Sourced Web-Application with a new feature of Tax Direction, which would allow the Tax-Payer to provide optional details of how he/she wishes the government to spend their tax amount. (The Tax Payer would speak about the problem and the Government is expected to invest on the solution to that; the taxpayer may also directly suggest the solution methodology) 4)   Allow the feature to be tested by a few users 5)   Develop a clustering model so that similar directions are clubbed together, thus allowing wide spread application and insight generation 6)   Present this solution to small governments for implementation and understand how the Tax Amount actually gets utilised and whether the governments would feel this soft power of the people as a help towards governance and sustainable development on the Kardashev Scale. 7)   Finally develop a simplified application with collaboration of a Government as an experimental project for extremely easy Tax Amount payments with Tax Direction for smartphones (if any Government support is obtained)

Project plan.

  • Week 1

    SkillSet 1 (Tax Expert): Develop the similarities and differences in the individual tax amount collection among countries of interest
    SkillSet 2 (Web Application Expert): Create a basic Web Application which would allow users to submit their Personal Details with their Tax Amount (similar to existing portals as a testing front)
    SkillSet 3 (DS/AI/ML Expert): Develop a classification model for understanding the basic data based on existing features in the Tax Portals

  • Week 2

    Transition between Weeks 1 and 3 (we would hold meetings and complete all tasks of Week 1 so that we are ready to take the main final challenge)

  • Week 3

    SkillSet 1 (Tax Expert): Understand what features would help in governance and ponder on the Tax Direction and it’s benefits SkillSet 2 (Web Application Expert): Upgrade the basic Web Application which would allow users to submit theirTax Amount alongwith the option of exercising the optional feature of Tax Direction SkillSet 3 (DS/AI/ML Expert): Develop a classification model for understanding and visualising this new featured data allowing better governance

  • Week 4

    Week 3 tasks continue

  • Week 5

    Week 5 – 7: Approach governments with the basic model for development of such a system on an experimental basis. Simultaneously focus on publication of our work in appropriate OpenAccess-SCI journals with open-sourced code and freely available results

Learning outcomes.

1) Understanding Tax structures and data 2) Data Tagging (Amount tagged with Direction) 3) Data Classification (Clustering similar Tax Directions with their Tax Amounts) 4) Web Application development (for testing) 5) Use AI/ML/NLP applications and cluster data 6) Data Visualization (after the clustering has been done) 7) Publication with collaborative efforts of the results obtained from synthetic data 8) Collaboration with Governments for implementation and upgradation of this idea

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