Chapter 6

    The IRS is gaining ground on finding tax fraud more efficiently than previous years. After looking at the 1040 individual tax return there are numerous checks to help catch and prevent loop holes in the system that are causing the government revenue. The first thing I noticed was the two options for married couples filing together or separately. This makes the tax payer to put down the social security number, most likely the primary key in a query, of their spouse filing separately so that they may not both claim their children as dependents. Second, they chose to once again include the social security number of every person being claimed as a dependent. They once again can use this to verify that they are actually supposed to be claimed to the tax payer. Honestly anything after that starts to get too complicated for me to understand what they are trying to find out.
    The IRS had a few issues that they had to deal with when it came to the system for tax collecting, analyzing, and auditing. A management issue that could have been addressed was creating a flexible queries to make finding information in the database easier for employees and expediting the process of auditing. An organizational issue that they needed to deal with was to form policies to help managers and other workers better interpret whether the tax payer in question made a mistake or was trying to commit fraud. The implementation of these policies didn't necesarryily reduce the number of audits significantly, but it did reduce the amount of unnecessary audits on good people who just made a mistake. A technological issue that they obviously faced was the upgrade from the old database to the new database warehouse. They had to replace their old information storage, tapes, and replace them with much more effecient and less space consuming "network-attached storage applicances." They had to find the personnel to monitor the status of the servers as well as a location to keep the servers.
    This week I read chapter 6 and the case study on the terrorist watch list. We took a clicker quiz on thursday and discussed the case study. I also collaborated with my group on our project and on the business proposal that is due tomorrow. Finally, I read the case study on the IRS and am now completing the blog for this week.
    This week we learned about databases. We learned that databases make it easy for a business to keep track of alot of information, attributes, for a particular person/item, record, along with numerous other people, a field. We learned about the up-keep for these databases such as data cleansing, checking and fixing data redundancy; normalization, creating small tables that are more useful and less confusing that every piece of information about a subject; and data quality audit, which is a check to make sure that the information entered into the database is complete and correct. We learned about data mining which is finding out information that was not really being looked for. An example we learned about was the realationship between beer and diapers. As is turns out as sales for diapers went up, so did sales for beer. This is information that could be helpful and utilized for profit or efficiency.That pretty much wraps up this weeks chapter. Thanks for reading!