论文标题

整合奖励最大化和人口估计:内部税收服务审计选择的顺序决策

Integrating Reward Maximization and Population Estimation: Sequential Decision-Making for Internal Revenue Service Audit Selection

论文作者

Henderson, Peter, Chugg, Ben, Anderson, Brandon, Altenburger, Kristen, Turk, Alex, Guyton, John, Goldin, Jacob, Ho, Daniel E.

论文摘要

我们介绍了一个新的设置,优化和刺激结构化的土匪。在这里,政策必须选择一批武器,每个武器都以其自身的环境为特征,这将使之最大化奖励并保持奖励的准确(理想公正)人口估计。此设置是许多公共部门和私营部门应用程序固有的,通常需要处理延迟的反馈,小数据和分配变化。我们证明了其对美国国税局(IRS)的实际数据的重要性。美国国税局每年对税基进行审核。它最重要的两个目标是确定可疑的误报并估算“税收差距” - 所付费金额与所欠真实金额之间的全球差异。基于与IRS的独特合作,我们将这两个过程作为统一的优化和估计结构化强盗。我们分析了针对IRS问题的优化和估计方法,并提出了一种新的机制,以实现与基线方法相当的奖励的无偏见估计。这种方法有可能提高审计功效,同时维持与税收差距有关的政策估计。这具有重要的社会后果,因为当前的税收差距估计为将近半数万亿美元。我们建议这种问题设定是进一步研究的肥沃基础,我们强调了它有趣的挑战。目前,该研究和相关研究的结果正在纳入IRS审计选择方法的持续改进中。

We introduce a new setting, optimize-and-estimate structured bandits. Here, a policy must select a batch of arms, each characterized by its own context, that would allow it to both maximize reward and maintain an accurate (ideally unbiased) population estimate of the reward. This setting is inherent to many public and private sector applications and often requires handling delayed feedback, small data, and distribution shifts. We demonstrate its importance on real data from the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The IRS performs yearly audits of the tax base. Two of its most important objectives are to identify suspected misreporting and to estimate the "tax gap" -- the global difference between the amount paid and true amount owed. Based on a unique collaboration with the IRS, we cast these two processes as a unified optimize-and-estimate structured bandit. We analyze optimize-and-estimate approaches to the IRS problem and propose a novel mechanism for unbiased population estimation that achieves rewards comparable to baseline approaches. This approach has the potential to improve audit efficacy, while maintaining policy-relevant estimates of the tax gap. This has important social consequences given that the current tax gap is estimated at nearly half a trillion dollars. We suggest that this problem setting is fertile ground for further research and we highlight its interesting challenges. The results of this and related research are currently being incorporated into the continual improvement of the IRS audit selection methods.

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