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NEW YORK STATE CO-WINNER OF
2014 FTA AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING TECHNOLOGY APPLICATION
Washington State given honorable mention

WASHINGTON, D.C. (APRIL 15, 2014). The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance is one of two winners of the 2014 FTA Award for Technology. New York’s winning program, Fraudulent Refund Prevention, is featured this week. The other co-winner will be unveiled next week.

Awards will be presented at the FTA Annual Meeting, June 8-11 in St. Petersburg, Fla. The winning agencies have been invited to present the details of their programs during the Technology breakout.

Judges were John Vranna, retired tax administrator; Steve Miller, retired tax administrator; and Karla Hulett, American Trucking Association.

Technology Award judges also wanted to draw special attention to a program in Washington State, awarding an honorable mention to the Property Tax Geographic Information System.

New York’s fraud prevention program is two-pronged, with both a technology approach and a personnel approach.

The technology is a predictive intelligence-business analytics system that has dramatically improved the agency’s ability to identify fraudulent refund returns prior to refund issuance. The Department of Taxation and Finance re-built a business analytics system that it already used for audit selection and post-processing enforcement. The agency stopped 255,000 fraudulent and erroneous refunds valued at more than $413 million in 2013.

Personnel consists of a new fraud analysis and selection team consisting of two full-time audit supervisors and seven contributing staffers. The team uses human intelligence to target large-scale refund fraud schemes, using the data from the new technology and existing reports to help them focus on the most productive areas of potential fraud.

Washington State’s new app modernizes and streamlines Washington’s apportionment process for centrally-assessed utilities. Before, the process was time-intensive and tedious. Each utility had to annually report all personal and real property within nearly 3,200 tax code areas – and all on paper. Those geographic boundaries shifted frequently. With the new application, assets are already geo-located, area changes can be updated, and utilities only need to submit changes to their assets (adding new ones and deleting old ones). They can report using address, parcel number, airport code, latitude and longitude, or address, among other options. The new process is 100 percent electronic. Taxpayers are filing their apportionment reports six months earlier than before. The new program also identified errors in the old database. Enhancements will allow taxpayers to load reports directly into the system and view and edit property locations.

The Federation of Tax Administrators is a nonprofit organization composed of taxation and revenue departments of the fifty states, District of Columbia, New York City and Philadelphia. Its mission is to improve the standards and methods of tax administration

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