Simultaneous Classification and Regression for Zakat Under-Reporting Detection

Abstract

Tax revenue represents an essential budget source for most countries around the world. Accordingly, the modernization of relevant technological infrastructure has become a key factor of tax administration strategy for improving tax collection efficiency. In particular, the fiscal consolidation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been supported by considerable development in tax policy and administration, aimed at raising more taxes from non-oil activities. In fact, non-Saudi investors are liable for income tax in Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, Saudi citizen investors (and citizens of the GCC countries) are liable for Zakat, an Islamic assessment. Typically, taxpayers are in charge of preparing and accurately reporting their Zakat declaration. This allows tax authorities to overview and audit their business activities. However, despite administration efforts to increase taxpayer compliance, considerable revenue remains at under-reporting risk. In this paper, we introduce a novel intelligent approach to support tax authority efforts in detecting under-reporting among Zakat payer declarations. In particular, the proposed solution aims at improving detection accuracy and determining the fraud cases that correspond to a higher revenue at risk. Specifically, we formulate Zakat under-reporting detection as a supervised machine learning task through the design of a deep neural network that performs simultaneous classification and regression tasks. In particular, the proposed network contains an input layer, five hidden layers, and two output layers for classification and regression. Zakat declarations are mapped into the predefined “under-reporting” or “actual declaration” classes. Moreover, the revenue at risk caused by the predicted fraud cases is learned by the designed model. This allows the proposed approach to prioritize the auditing of specific Zakat payers based on the corresponding predicted revenue at risk. A real dataset including 51,919 Zakat declarations was used to validate and assess the designed model. Further, the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) boosted the proposed model performance in terms of classification and prioritization.