Firm receives patent on natural language processing and character recognition technology
As companies continue to struggle with synthesizing and understanding enormous amounts of data, especially financial data, and remaining tax compliant, KPMG LLP today announced it was granted U.S. Patent No. 10,922,358 for its Tax Data Reader innovation. This tool rapidly extracts relevant information from lengthy tax reporting forms and seamlessly plugs it directly into tax returns, saving time and money while reducing human error; a timely innovation as the 2021 tax filing deadline approaches.
The Tax Data Reader is especially useful for populating a Schedule K-1 (Form 1065), which typically includes a cover page followed by hundreds of pages of footnotes comprised of unstructured data that needs to be sifted through and extracted for entry into a tax return.
“We’re using natural language processing and machine learning to convert a massive amount of unstructured data into structured data while saving hours of manual labor to input the information,” said Kevin Valek, KPMG Tax partner and Asset Management Tax leader. “For one of our financial services clients, the tool works through more than 300 K-1 forms in less than 10 minutes, saving 80% in manual hours and resulting in a 50% increase in productivity on higher value tasks for their people – it’s a game changer.”
Beyond time-savings and increased compliance for a company, KPMG’s investment in technology tools like the Tax Data Reader can help businesses become more efficient so their people can focus on high-value strategy and execution rather than on the tedious tasks of filling out complex forms.
“With companies increasingly struggling with how to organize and make sense of their vast amounts of financial data, we’ve created a tool that eradicates their pain points,” said Brad Brown, KPMG partner and U.S. and Global Tax Technology leader. “It’s all about making tax simpler via technology and equipping our clients with a sound data strategy so they can focus instead on running their businesses.”
The development of the Tax Data Reader is part of KPMG’s broader Tax Reimagined offering, which provides a listen-to-design approach to achieving a company’s future tax vision and which prioritizes a technological approach to tax and compliance.
Technology as a KPMG Differentiator
KPMG has invested in many emerging data & analytics technologies to continuously improve the quality and efficiency of our services. For example, in December 2020, the firm received a U.S. patent for Ignite, KPMG’s Artificial Intelligence suite of capabilities. These patents are a component of KPMG’s intellectual property portfolio and build on a host of strategic investments the firm is making in emerging technologies, as well as partnerships KPMG has entered with some of the world’s leading technology companies – all with the objective of developing and deploying technology-based solutions that address the complex business challenges of our clients.
