Mongolia
The Mongolian Tax Administration (MTA) is the government agency responsible for tax administration, revenue collection, and compliance enforcement in Mongolia. As a critical institution serving a population of approximately 3.5 million people, the Tax Authority plays a pivotal role in the country’s economic stability and growth.
It is essential for the Tax Authority to ensure that the information obtained from the taxpayer's tax registry is accurate, complete, and reliable. It plays a crucial role in implementing strategies for tax administration based on data integration and analysis.
Addressing data fragmentation, access bottlenecks, and system inefficiencies
The Tax Authority’s legacy system did not have a centralized platform for data and analytics, let alone Artificial Intelligence (AI). Data resided in multiple disparate systems, which made it difficult to collect and consolidate data efficiently. Each data source could have its own format and access protocols, requiring manual intervention to gather and unify data for analysis.
The manual collection of data was time-consuming and prone to errors, with inconsistencies in the data quality and formatting adding to the problem. The effort required to gather, consolidate, and verify data meant that it could take a substantial amount of time to have data ready for analysis.
Compounding the structural problem, non-IT personnel had limited immediate access to data, which would also slow down decision-making processes. The IT department was often a bottleneck, as they were responsible for extracting, transforming, and loading data before it could be used by other departments.
And with an ever-growing volume of data, the Tax Authority's previous systems were struggling to scale efficiently. This lack of scalability caused further delays - and increased costs - as data volumes grew, making it increasingly more challenging to manage and analyze large datasets effectively.
Leveraging Cloudera for scalable, secure, and comprehensive data management
In 2020, the Tax Authority chose to use Cloudera, a hybrid platform for data, analytics, and AI that helps enterprises transform data of all types into valuable, trusted insights. The Authority opted to deploy the Cloudera on-premises, using their own physical servers rather than a public cloud service.
Cloudera enables the centralization of the Tax Authority’s data management processes. This unification has significantly reduced the complexities associated with handling multiple data sources and formats, leading to more efficient data processing. With Cloudera in an on-premises deployment, the Tax Authority also benefits from enhanced security as the data resides within its own controlled environment – critical given the financially-sensitive nature of the data.
Altankhuyag.B, Director of Information Technology Centre of GDT said, “A key reason why we chose Cloudera was its end-to-end, complete solution for data management and analytics. Cloudera covers all stages of the data lifecycle, from data ingestion and processing to analytics and machine learning, all within a single platform. This helps us ensure data governance, work more efficiently, and support more data and analytics use cases.”
The platform includes built-in support for a variety of advanced analytics, which enable quicker and more informed decision-making across the organization. As the Tax Authority’s requirements grow, the platform can scale to handle increased data volumes and more complex analytics and AI without significant new investments in infrastructure.
The data lakehouse architecture also includes Apache Iceberg and Impala. With datasets containing tables up to 800 million rows, these capabilities help the Tax Authority efficiently manage and analyze its vast datasets. Using Iceberg allows the Tax Authority to handle large data volumes from a variety of sources more effectively and helps meet its needs for both large-scale data management and real-time updates.
“Cloudera’s open data lakehouse with Apache Iceberg enhances our ability to manage and analyze data. Its scalable architecture adapts to our expanding requirements, enabling us to make quicker, more informed decisions without significant infrastructure investments,” explains Altankhuyag.
Boosting audit accuracy and compliance with Cloudera and advanced analytics
Cloudera's platform can also be easily integrated with other analytics, machine learning, and AI software. The Tax Authority uses Cloudera with the Konstanz Information Miner (KNIME) Analytics Platform to execute machine learning algorithms related to assessing taxpayer compliance. With trusted data in Cloudera and KNIME Analytics capabilities, the Tax Authority enhanced the accuracy of its compliance models, leading to improved outcomes.
For instance, by analyzing historical data from tax audits, the Tax Authority can identify patterns of non-compliance, refine its audit selection process, and assess audit outcomes quantitatively, contributing to more informed decision-making. This enables them to proactively address issues such as tax evasion and inaccurate tax reporting, ensuring a fair and transparent tax system.
Since the adoption of Cloudera, the operational efficiency of the Mongolian Tax Authority has significantly improved. Investigations conducted by the department on tax evasion are now completed approximately eight times faster due to streamlined processes.
