Proactive, Personalised Tax Experience with AI

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) aims to foster willing participation in the tax, superannuation, and registry systems, collecting the right amount of tax and information in the most efficient way for both government and taxpayers.
One of our key strategies is to design systems that make it easy to comply and hard not to, such as using proactive nudges and personalised insights – supported by trusted and effective digital services and integrated data. There is a wealth of information on taxation practices designed to make paying and lodging tax easy, but not all the right information reaches the right audience.

We therefore invite participants to design innovative AI-based solutions that bring the ATO’s aspiration to life: tax and super ‘just happen’ through simple digital interactions, authenticated identity, and verifiable, trusted data.

This challenge aims to identify gaps, consider solutions and develop a tool to work towards making paying taxes so seamless and automatic that most Australians barely notice it’s happening.

Some examples of how the ATO could envisage the use of AI to identify taxpayer needs, reduce effort, and build trust would be:
- Integrating third-party data to enable real-time, event-based processing that reduces errors and lodgment effort
- Applying “tell us once” principles so individual taxpayers do not have to repeat information to different agencies
- Shifting AI’s role from mainly detecting risks to actively guiding and supporting individual taxpayers before issues occur
- Designing with people in mind through human-centered, intuitive and inclusive digital experiences
- Embedding ethical AI aligned with the ATO’s data ethics principles and AI transparency statement.

But don’t limit your ideas to these areas, use your own experiences to shape your solution.

Participants are expected to:
- Use data to identify patterns, trends, or gaps in taxpayer behaviour or circumstances. Define one or more AI use cases that directly addresses this identified taxpayer need. Your concept should clearly link back to the evidence found in the data.
- Review the current myTax experience to identify and/or hypothesise where there are opportunities where AI could offer proactive guidance, reduce errors and compliance costs, or enhance the overall taxpayer journey.
- Design a proof of concept (PoC) of a digital solution that addresses your defined use cases. Your solution should consider the ethical, legal, and social implications of using data and digital technologies.