Finance Minister Asad Umar recently spoke in the National Assembly about amendments to the Finance Bill and hinted at using data and AI to identify tax evaders. "Algorithms are now very advanced. Global tax collection agencies don't rely solely on traditional methods for collection, they use modern technology," he said. "We want to use anonymised data to run algorithms which will help us identify tax evaders." But what algorithms was Umar referring to and how do they work?

America's tax enforcement agency, the Inland Revenue Service, is pretty sure Paulo Marques is an international tax evader. For the last five years, without fail, he's been summoned by the authorities to spend hours explaining the ins and outs of his revenue streams. But the Inland Revenue's computer doesn't know that, Marques tells the audience WIRED Money 2016. In fact, when it comes to stopping fraud, machines get it wrong far too often. "If you want to stop fraud, you really need to understand human behaviour," says Marques, who founded Feedzai, a company that uses big data to combat fraud.