Actian Helps Irish Revenue to Clamp Down on Fraud and Tax Evasion

GARTNER BI SUMMIT, February 7, 2011 – Actian Corporation (formerly Ingres Corp.), today announced that the Office of the Revenue Commissioners, the Irish government’s agency for tax and customs administration, has boosted its relationship with Actian by extending its use of Actian’s database products to incorporate the industry’s fastest data analytics engine, Vectorwise, to provide speedier reporting systems, enabling it to discharge its taxation responsibilities more efficiently.

The Office of the Revenue Commissioners, also known as Revenue, is responsible for the administration, assessment and collection of taxes, and the implementation of customs law. It processes more than 200 different types of declarations and returns covering all categories of taxes and duties for a customer base of approximately 2.2 million individual PAYE taxpayers and over 750,000 businesses including sole traders.

The data collected by Revenue is extensive and used for a range of purposes including processing and monitoring tax returns to ascertain whether customers and businesses are paying the right amount of tax and on time, claims for refunds and tax credits, and most importantly risk analysis and profiling to minimize tax evasion and avoidance. Risk rules and models are applied to tax declarations and transactions, increasingly in real-time, in order to identify anomalies and to mitigate the risk of fraudulent activities. With 80 Revenue offices countrywide and staff of approximately 6,000, it is crucial for Revenue to have reporting systems that provide the business with insights on tax assessment and collection at a lightning speed.

Previously, Revenue’s Business Intelligence team would have had to optimize performance through pre-built data aggregations, tune the performance of the database and cache data in order to provide response times for analytical reporting to its business managers in acceptable timeframes. This was a drain on both time and financial resources. With data growing exponentially, there was a need for a solution that can simplify data preparation, data management and shorten the development delivery cycle while enabling Revenue’s business managers to run queries faster and glean a real-time insight.

As a long-term user of Actian’s Ingres 9.2 database, Revenue decided to review Vectorwise as a complementary option to gauge how its performance and speed advantages would benefit its analytical reporting solutions. Vectorwise proves to be a very successful solution and has allowed Revenue to deliver applications to its business users via its business intelligence portal within a matter of seconds without resorting to building data aggregates, or staging data.
"In our own benchmarks and internal testing, we soon realized just how fast Vectorwise was, and as data sets get bigger, that performance differential becomes even more significant,” commented Maureen Byrne, Business Intelligence Manager, Revenue.

“Response times for complex reports have improved dramatically. It was a logical choice for us to implement Vectorwise on top of Actian’s relational database, Ingres.” "Revenue is a long term, valued customer which first adopted the Ingres database some years ago," said Steve Shine, CEO of Actian. "We're pleased to see it is investing further in Actian’s ground-breaking technology to meet analytical and reporting needs, and now look forward to introducing our recent innovation, Action Apps, that allows organizations to take action on information more quickly than ever before."

Vectorwise is one of the most significant database technology innovations of the last 20 years and meets broad business demands to analyze the exploding volumes of data. Since it was launched in June 2010, Vectorwise has successfully achieved performance increases in commercial deployments of 100x that of existing databases, by utilizing the latent processing power in modern hardware.

About the Office of the Revenue Commissioners
The mission of the Revenue Commissioners is to serve the community by fairly and efficiently collecting taxes and duties and implementing Customs controls.

Actian Corporation (formerly Ingres Corp.) is the first to unveil a cloud development platform for building Action Apps. Action Apps are lightweight consumer-style applications that automate business actions triggered by real-time changes in data. Actian products incite action at more than 10,000 customers worldwide by driving their mission critical workloads and providing rapid action insights to their data. Actian is headquartered in Redwood City, California with offices in New York, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Melbourne. Stay connected with Actian Corporation on Facebook and Twitter.

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This release was published on openPR.