From left: Tanzania’s Commissioner for External Finance Rished M. Bade; IGC Executive Director Jonathan Leape; British High Commissioner to Tanzania David Concar. At the inaugural TRA-IGC-REPOA International conference on Tax for Growth (15-16 May 2024).
IGC-CATA AI Taskforce Bootcamp
Tax for Growth, in partnership with the Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA) and the Commonwealth Association of Tax Administrators (CATA), is hosting a two-day bootcamp in Dar es Salaam on 25-26 August 2026 on the use of AI and data analytics for fraud detection and risk-based compliance.
Saugata Mittra
Policy Economist (Tax for Growth), International Growth Centre
Laura Fras
Policy Economist, Tax for Growth Initiative, International Growth CentreTejaswi Velayudhan
Assistant Professor, UC IrvineZehra Farooq
Secretary, Income Tax Policy, Federal Board of Revenue (FBR)Taha Barwahwala
Senior Data Research Associate, J-PAL South Asia-
Bootcamp-agenda-Tanzania.pdf
PDF document • 80.68 KB
The bootcamp brings together TRA and members of the new CATA AI Taskforce from Barbados, Canada, Malaysia, Mauritius, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and Zambia. It is a closed session for around 30 to 40 participants that prioritises practical exchange between tax administration officials over formal presentations, with short technical inputs from selected researchers. The activity advances the work programme of the CATA AI Taskforce ahead of the CATA Annual Technical Conference in Arusha in October 2026, which TRA is co-hosting.
The bootcamp will help participating administrations move from AI ambition and experimentation towards responsible deployment and scaling for fraud detection, taxpayer risk profiling, audit selection, and risk-based compliance. It treats AI not as an enforcement tool alone but as a way for administrations to move from broad compliance pressure towards more targeted and less contentious approaches that reduce unnecessary friction for taxpayers.
Structured around a practitioner case from the Federal Board of Revenue in Pakistan and the IGC-CATA toolkit on AI and data for tax administrations, the bootcamp will explore:
- How administrations can use AI and data analytics to identify higher-risk taxpayers, transactions, and behaviours, and translate those insights into proportionate compliance actions
- The data, technology, governance, legal frameworks, workforce capabilities, and operating models required for responsible adoption
- Evaluation and return on investment by design, with credible comparison-group and random-review approaches built in from the start
- Two worked implementation archetypes covering AI-supported taxpayer risk profiling and AI-enabled linked-data fraud detection
- Safeguards, organisational failure modes, and stop-or-scale decisions
- Country-level 90-day adoption plans and agreed outputs for the October CATA Annual Technical Conference
Partners and participants
The Taskforce brings together revenue authorities from across the Commonwealth, including:
- Barbados Revenue Authority
- Federal Inland Revenue Service, Nigeria
- Zambia Revenue Authority
- Mauritius Revenue Authority
- HM Revenue & Customs, United Kingdom
- Canada Revenue Agency
- Inland Revenue Board of Malaysia