Finance launches AI chatbot to revolutionise tax return analysis

A new virtual assistant to help finance officials and managers analyse and translate the thousands of variables offered by the more than 30 million tax returns submitted by Italian taxpayers. A valuable ally to verify, data in hand, the health of the Italian tax authorities. The new chatbot for analysing tax returns, developed by the Finance Department's Economic-Fiscal Studies and Research Directorate led by Director Maria Teresa Monteduro, in collaboration with Sogei, works as an in-house virtual assistant based on advanced artificial intelligence. This tool is designed to analyse both textual documents and aggregated data related to tax returns, with the aim of improving productivity and timeliness in the processing of statistical information.

As explained by Monteduro during her presentation at the ongoing ForumPa in Rome, the chatbot uses innovative techniques such as Large Language Models (LLM), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and code interpreters to understand, interpret and generate text documents, as well as perform mathematical operations and complex data analysis. With these capabilities, it can produce detailed reports, graphs and maps representing variables such as the distribution of taxpayers by income class, geographic area, age and gender.

Interaction with the new virtual assistant is based on natural language questions and answers, thus simplifying many analysis tasks that previously required time-consuming and, above all, specialised skills. The virtual assistant makes it possible to extract value from high-quality tax data, transforming it into useful information for making policy and control decisions on the taxes Italians have to declare and pay. During the presentation, demonstration videos were shown illustrating concrete use cases, highlighting how the chatbot can help the operator who can ask specific questions or request particular analyses, and the chatbot responds with processed data, visualisations and text summaries. This system represents a significant step forward in the use of artificial intelligence in public administration, with an approach that keeps the human role central in the supervision and final interpretation of results.

The project is part of a broader process of digital innovation in the Public Administration, which however requires a cultural and structural change. As emphasised during the round table by Paolo Boccardelli, Rector of the Luiss University, it is crucial to invest in human capital in order to develop appropriate skills to manage and exploit the new technologies. Mario Nobile, director general of Agid, also pointed out that the Finance Department's chatbot is one of the few concrete examples of effective application of AI in the Italian public administration and will be included among national best practices.